Why and how you can automate Cloud Security

The world has embraced digital transformation, but cloud environments are highly dynamic and vulnerable. Rapidly changing environments and owners spread across an organization makes it highly difficult to manage security needs efficiently. This means that security is still the biggest obstacle to cloud adoption. And the only solution to this is the tech world’s worst-kept secret – automation. 

Security Automation

Security automation is the concept of using technology to remove the human element entirely and automate security processes. It helps organizations move away from a reactive state and transition to a proactive state of dealing with security operations. The approach uses software tools to detect, understand and treat security threats of all types using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Security automation facilitates quick incident response. 

Why should you automate cloud security?

Faster threat detection

Security threats are detected immediately which means the chances of any security incidents are significantly reduced. Vulnerabilities don’t have to be audited by any external force before systems are alerted, thus speeding up the threat detection process.

Increases efficiency 

The effort and time required to secure your sources manually are quite high. This means the manpower you have available to do productive work decreases. Security automation enables you to focus on efficiency and innovation as less manpower is required to keep assets secure. 

Provides consistency 

When detecting and remediating security vulnerabilities is done manually, threats can be overlooked leading to inconsistent security operations. Security automation ensures security policies are enforced consistently and accurately across your entire cloud infrastructure.

Reduces alert fatigue

When there is a security threat, the staff receives constant alerts and is required to investigate each one of them. This makes it challenging to identify and respond to critical security threats as they get lost in the chaos. Security automation makes it easy to set protocols to deal with threatening security vulnerabilities beforehand. 

How can you automate cloud security?

Present day cloud security needs to go beyond applying basic security safeguards. There needs to be automation across every layer of your cloud infrastructure. 

1. Cloud security posture management

Cloud security posture management or CSPM helps identify and remediate security risks within cloud infrastructure configurations. It assesses an organization’s cloud environment configurations and locates settings that could allow security vulnerabilities to exist. CSPM facilitates continuous monitoring of a configuration and assists in mitigating misconfigurations. 

Once vulnerabilities are identified and prioritized, CSPM automation tools can automatically remediate them as they are being discovered in constantly changing cloud infrastructure. This decreases the time required to respond to vulnerabilities in multi-tiered organizations with complex infrastructures. CSPM solutions allow automation to interact with other teams, thus improving collaborations. 

CSPM enables organizations to recognize unused assets, verifies the integrity of deployed systems, and enables cost optimization. It helps reduce threats within the way cloud services themselves are configured. 

2. Infrastructure as code

Infrastructure as code solutions come with pre-defined templates for environment and asset configurations. This can be leveraged by security teams to enforce adherence to standards by auditing template files and enabling consistent and secure deployments. 

3. Workload protection

The next step to security automation is addressing the risks associated with the way specific workloads are configured. This is where cloud workload automation comes in and enables organizations to enforce security policies specific to workloads they run.

4. Automated threat hunting

Threat hunting is the concept of proactively recognizing vulnerabilities in your cloud infrastructure irrespective of whether or not they have occurred yet. To successfully carry out threat hunting, organizations require real-time threat intelligence. Security automation can help enforce rules that adjust security policies according to the latest threat intelligence automatically. This can help organizations be equipped and prepared to handle all kinds of latest threats.

5. Alert remediation and toil reduction

When it comes to an organization’s security, more often than not the security team is drowning in security alerts. These alerts, apart from being overbearing, are also somewhat vague in nature. They require significant investigation from the security team to figure out which alerts are critical, which are trivial, and which are false positives. Security automation here means sorting alerts into categories and configuring security systems to provoke alerts that show the importance of a threat and how it will affect system operations. This means fewer and more precise alerts.

Automated security is also a boon for your engineers as it takes away the toil of performing monotonous tasks endlessly and allows them to focus on innovative work that drives great value. Automating mundane tasks is the key to your engineers’ happiness as well as productivity. 

Torq

With Torq, the no-code security automation platform, security teams of all sizes can implement robust cybersecurity postures at scale. It connects across an organization’s cloud infrastructure and facilitates automated security throughout the entire cloud security stack. Torq helps update security policies and configurations, remediate risks rapidly, and provide consistent responses to security threats. It streamlines an organization’s security ecosystem by driving operational efficiency. Torq empowers anyone to build automated workflows that can run in response to security risks.

Conclusion

Cloud security issues have been seen as a major and probably the only hurdle to cloud adoption. But it’s not enough to just employ basic security solutions anymore. Security automation is a necessity because security without automation exposes major chinks in your armor. Cloud security automation helps continuously and automatically remediate your assets as well as your environment. 

If you have questions related to this topic, feel free to book a meeting with one of our solutions experts, mail to sales@amazic.com.