WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF A CLOUD SECURITY ASSESSMENT?
Suchit Kumar M
Dec 8, 2021 4:25:49 PM
What Is The Purpose of a Cloud Security Assessment?
An organization's cloud infrastructure is evaluated and analysed as part of a cloud security assessment in order to ensure that it is safe from different types of security threats. The goal of the test is to:
- Find the weak areas in the cloud infrastructure and the ways in which they might be exploited.
- The network should be examined for evidence of exploitation.
- Describe how to be safe in the future.
| Interviews and review of documents are used to evaluate the security posture of business cloud infrastructure |
| Examine the administration of user identities and access, including the creation of user profiles, roles, and private keys. |
| Check for common faults in segmentation and firewall policies. |
| Take a look at your company's cloud infrastructure incident response policy. |
| It's important to look at cloud storage security in terms of both object and block level security. |
| The advanced service provides security settings that are unique to each cloud service provider to be reviewed. |
| Containerized and serverless applications may all be protected with a same set of tools. |
What do you get out of it?
There are substantial operational advantages to cloud computing over on-premise computers. Innovation and cloud-based dependence, however, carry with them, new risks. Cloud-based workloads frequently outpace a company's ability to provide security services, putting IT executives in the dark. Among enterprises with several cloud accounts or subscriptions, the absence of crucial security measures for less vital workloads is widespread. Even with the cloud's less critical services, a breach may have catastrophic implications.
In order to defend everywhere, anytime, the cloud requires more complex security measures than a conventional network. As more people utilise cloud-based solutions to meet their work-from-home requirements, the attack surface of a company might grow unintentionally.
A common cause of cloud security issues is incorrect setup. Mistakes made by network engineers when a new technology is being implemented often lead to cloud misconfigurations. These and other flaws may be spotted by doing a cloud security assessment.
Another problem is excessive network privileges. Untrusted third-party access might come via incoming traffic, or it can amplify minor breaches caused by illegal outgoing traffic.
Static credentials used to authenticate individuals or workloads to the cloud service provider, and the absence of multi-factor authentication (MFA), a security strategy that relies on two or more independent pieces of evidence to validate the user's identity, are among the issues. Data may be tampered with, exfiltrated or deleted with ease because to these weaknesses. Malicious behaviour is more harder to spot in cloud-based systems because of poor or erroneous recording. When it comes to cloud security, assessing the security and governance of the cloud infrastructure is critical, says security experts at Extreme Compute.
What are the advantages of it?
To guarantee that an organization's network and assets are appropriately protected and secure, a cloud security review is conducted. The review will help to identify areas of vulnerability in the design, as well as specific suggestions for improving defences and enhancing future capabilities.
You can benefit from a cloud security audit as:
- Implementing the cloud security assessment's personalised configuration changes reduces the risk of unintended configuration errors.
- The cloud security assessment team's advice may help a corporation identify and react to a problem before it becomes a major issue.
- In the event of a breach, the cloud security assessment team will provide advice to help companies recover quicker.
- Improved administration of client accounts: Organizations with inadequate identification systems may save time and reduce the danger of allowing too much access by using an identity management system.
- It's possible that a cloud security assessment may uncover anomalies in the company's cloud settings that might have been the result of a breach.
How to do it?
There are normally four stages to a cloud security assessment:
- The assessment team gains a better understanding of the client's business goals, planned architecture, and expected enhancements via the review of documents and interviews.
- Automation and manual testing are used to gather information about the environment, identify misconfigurations and gaps in the ideal design, and examine attack chains.
- Coming up with ideas: It is up to the client's security team to implement the suggestions made by the assessment team.
- Presentation: The assessment team gathers with internal stakeholders to present results and discuss suggestions for particular technical and high-level issues.
- Forensic investigation and incident response for cloud breaches
- Assessment of Cloud Compromises: Check for infractions in your cloud environment (even from past)
- The Red/Blue Team to evaluate your cyber security by simulating a targeted cloud assault.