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Enterprises across the world are leveraging cloud to achieve elasticity, flexibility, scalability, innovation, automation and much more. Though cloud brings new opportunities to modernize businesses, transform and innovate , security risks still remain the most concerned huddle to cloud adoption. Complexity of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments bring in more complexity and makes it difficult to transition to cloud decision.
Security is often the most thought of area and considered the biggest obstacle to cloud adoption – in the real world however, it can be a bigger accelerator with automation. Automation of cloud security enables organizations to gather key information required to secure their cloud workloads.
Today we look more in detail about cloud security automation, best practices, strategies which enterprises can adopt to bring in benefits to businesses and be less worrisome when it comes to security in cloud and customer data.
What is Cloud Security Automation
Cloud automation in the security domain helps to automate management, deployment, and orchestration of resources and applications. Security tasks repetitive in nature can be automated, building security best practices into their processes, and significantly reducing the likelihood of human error scenarios which are quite common in repetitive tasks as they bring in monotony and boredom in repeat operations and help in building a more secure and robust security posture.
Best Practices
Let’s look at some practices which would help in implementation of cloud security automation.
- Building infrastructure automatically – is one way which would release security engineers from the tasks of manual configuration of user access, security groups, network configurations, Firewalls, DNS names, log shipping etc. and reduce the human error chances.
- Automation scripts – automations scripts help to quickly build and bring an instance into production with all security arrangements in place such as installation of real time threat detection agents, central authentication, multi-factor authentication enablement, patching and so on.
- Automation of deployments – Deployment automations in DevSecOps practice ensures modifications are made using DevOps tool script deployment across all instances or servers automatically and address threats immediately.
- Automation security monitoring – Automated security monitoring in the cloud helps to respond to security threats quickly and defend critical assets in a proactive manner.
Benefits of Security Automation
- Less time spend on security operations
- Security operations are performed in consistent manner
- Reduction in manual error
- Advanced security measures can be configured without manual efforts
- Compliance posture enhancements
- Rapid identification and fixing of security issues
Cloud Security Automation Strategies
Utilize Infrastructure as a Code (IaC)
Using IaC tools such as Terraform and CloudFormation help to codify cloud resources. This approach effectively provides mitigation to configuration drifts, which is resulted from ad-hoc changes made in cloud infrastructure. IaC helps to keep configuration consistent across multiple cloud environments by deployment of reusable modules as per secure baseline standards defined by security engineers.
Security Automation with CI/CD Pipeline
Automation tools integration into CI/CD pipeline help to identify vulnerabilities and prevent the deployment of vulnerable and insecure configurations. Static application security test (SAST) tools used to identify vulnerabilities in code base and linter tools are used to improvise code quality and help in identification of insecure coding practices.
Snyk is one such popular tool used to achieve robust security automation in CI/CD processes.
Policy-as-a-tool to automate Enforcement of Policies
Tools such as HashiCorp Sentinel and Open Policy Agent are Policy-as-Code tools which are used to automate security and perform compliance checks. These tools enable enforcement of security policies to identify misconfigured and non-compliant resources before they are brought into production environments. Utilization of this kind of approach helps organizations to proactively integrate security and compliance checks into the development phase itself.
Auto Remediation in Incident Response
Event driven remediation automation can be implemented in tools provided by major cloud providers such as AWS EventBridge which can trigger a custom AWS Lambda function to take remediation action on cloud resource or third-party tools like Prisma cloud which provides automated remediation capabilities.
Adapt Security Orchestration
Security orchestration and automation response technology solutions helps to combine various security technologies into an integrated system to achieve improvement in security operations, automation of incident response and reduce the time which goes in mitigation of threats or risks. It works by collecting data from various sources such as network sensors, endpoint agents, firewalls (WAF) logs, and analyse them to detect threats and take predefined actions such as blocking malicious IP address, escalating incident to human analyst for further investigation etc.
Quick fact !
The global security automation market size is estimated at USD 8.9 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.4% from 2023 to 2028