Tips to Increase Hybrid and Multicloud Security

Cloud technology is a powerful tool that facilitates collaboration among distributed workforces and allows companies to scale their digital workloads rapidly. According to a Microsoft survey, 95% of respondents said cloud technology was critical to the success of their organizations, and 86% planned to increase their investments in hybrid and multicloud cloud technology.

However, cloud technology also carries more significant risks. Lack of visibility and coverage in hybrid and multicloud environments can make identifying and resolving troubles easier for security teams. Security teams are also asked to monitor fragmented tools across different clouds, creating a unified view of your end-to-end security posture challenging.

Microsoft research from earlier this year found that 86% of decision-makers surveyed believed their current cybersecurity strategies needed to be revised to protect their multicloud environments. So how should organizations adapt their security approach?

Creating a single-pane view

Cloud technology allows companies to rapidly scale their digital workloads because they are open to managing physical devices or IT infrastructure. However, this agility can also make it challenging to keep track of your various workloads; data flows, and applications because they’re spread out across a mix of different cloud platforms and on-premises locations.

Securing a hybrid or multicloud environment requires organizations to have cross-platform visibility and control in a single-pane view. That way, they can view the security posture of multiple workloads at once, regardless of location.

Using CNPP for code-to-cloud context

For many organizations, security, and compliance used to be separate silos, making it difficult for development and security teams to protect applications in the cloud. More than half (54%) of companies do not integrate security into their DevOps pipelines, according to Microsoft’s “Enterprise DevOps Report.” Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) integrate these silos into a single, easy-to-reference platform to help organizations secure and protect cloud-native applications.

Vital security hygiene means monitoring and remediating code within the same dashboard view that organizations use to manage their overall cloud security posture. CNPPs enable greater collaboration and integration between development and security teams while reducing the chance of code issues being moved to the cloud. By taking all infrastructure scanning signals as code and combining it with data sensitivity, identity, and runtime intelligence, CNAPPs enable security teams to make recommendations and prioritize risks within the context of the entire hybrid or multicloud network.

Strengthening security hygiene with threat detection and response

Active threat detection is critical to protecting the cloud environment from potential cybersecurity breaches. For example, organizations must examine the connections between applications, data stores, and workflows to anticipate how threat actors might move through their environments to compromise operations.

Analysts must stay on the same page when protecting workloads, developers, security administrators, and security operations centers. It is also essential that organizations take a cohesive and collaborative approach to cloud security by ensuring that all key players work together to create security integrations that cover the full scope of their threat landscape. This can be similar to incorporating anti-malware scanning tools into DevOps to protect a company’s code from malware or prevent attackers from entering your network by hardening container security.