Understanding why is cloud-native security imperative?

With increasing move to cloud infrastructures, we have seen rapid growth of cloud-native applications. These applications are a collection of small, faster, and integrated services. By creating and operating cloud-native applications, businesses bring new ideas to market faster and respond instantly to customer demands. These applications typically empower enterprises to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic cloud environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Serverless architectures, containers, Kubernetes, and others are some cloud-native applications. Though these are designed to deliver enhanced business value, they also introduce a set of cybersecurity risks.

Businesses substantially move to cloud computing in order to boost the scalability and availability of applications. This can be achieved through self-service and on-demand provisioning of resources, in addition to the application life cycle automation from development to production. Cloud-native applications embrace the runtime and services provided by the cloud platform to create resilient, agile, and scalable solutions.

As noted by IBM, the approach to cloud infrastructure for the development and deployment of applications relies on:

Microservices architecture: Microservices, as architecture, refers to an approach to building complex applications out of smaller independent services.

Containerization: Container technology offers a lightweight, highly portable virtualization solution.

Automating with DevOps: Development and IT teams work collaboratively using tools to automate, build, deploy, and manage apps.

Securing Cloud-Native Applications

Securing cloud-native infrastructure requires a profound understanding to detect where the security needs. Considering security professionals' responsibilities that rely on the services they are consuming is also imperative to implement security measures to apps. According to Gartner, 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer's fault through 2025. To close this security gap, CIOs will need to deploy and enforce policies on cloud ownership, responsibility and risk acceptance.

So, what is essential to securing cloud-native applications?

High Fidelity Visibility and Context

Visibility is the most crucial aspect of cloud applications' cybersecurity. A lack of centralized administration and visibility can lead to the chances of undetected misconfigurations, as well as the inability to quantify risks. Security alerts that lack context and generally require human intervention can also result in delays in mitigation and alert fatigue.

Continuous Security

As enterprises leverage cloud-native technologies, such as Kubernetes, across their clouds, the complexity and distributed nature of these platforms significantly require businesses to plan strategies not only for DevOps, but also for security. Addressing vulnerabilities and threats in the cloud-native development model and infrastructure requires continuous security across the software development lifecycle. It also requires a shared security responsibility and ownership, along with shared processes and tools. This will enable organizations to keep cloud-native deployments in general, and infrastructure, applications and data specifically, safe and cybersecurity-proof.

Security of Server Workloads

Cloud workload security is particularly challenging and as workloads pass among multiple vendors and hosts so the responsibility for securing the workload must be shared. Many companies still use traditional enterprise security solutions to endpoints security, network segmentation, and perimeter protection. However, in a cloud-native environment, businesses cannot rely on these traditional security solutions. Server workloads these days are more vulnerable to cyberattacks than ever before. According to VMware, micro-segmentation and bare-metal hypervisor are two main ways to protect workloads with cloud workload protection platform.

Furthermore, organizations need to adopt an integrated cloud-native security platform that coalesces artificial intelligence, automation, intelligence, threat detection and data analytics capabilities to close security gaps.