Companies across all industry verticals have been leveraging the elasticity, efficiency, and innovation of the cloud. Yet, a recent study showed that only 35% of companies have fully achieved their expected results from the cloud, and 65% knew ‘security and compliance risks as a meaningful barrier.
Though cloud gives new opportunities to modernize, transform, and innovate, security risk remains the most important hurdle to cloud adoption. Moreover, the complexity of multi-cloud and hybrid environments further complicate the drive to the cloud.
While security is often regarded as the biggest obstacle to cloud adoption – in reality – it can be its biggest accelerator – when automated.
Automating the cloud security method enables companies to gather the information they require to secure their cloud environments and redirect their struggles to innovation and growth.
Automating the security processes that are conventionally produced and deployed manually brings a new development to the cloud. However, many businesses struggle through the implementation of cloud security automation.
Here are the five most helpful practices for the successful implementation of cloud security automation:
5 Steps for Successful Cloud Security Automation
1. Automate Infrastructure Buildout
By automating infrastructure buildout, the engineers are released from the task of manually configuring user access, security groups, networks, firewalls, DNS names, and log shipping, among others. This significantly decreases the scope for engineers to make security errors.
Moreover, the security company need not worry about the best practices each time they spin up a new situation, as they only have to affect the scripts, not the situations, to make the changes.
2. Automate Script
In common IT, a zero-day vulnerability or any other important security issue needs an organization’s system engineers to work rigorously to patch each server manually. But automating scripts needs only a single line change in the manifests to assure the newly released version was running instead.
These automation script sources are declarative management tools that automatically arrange instances, virtualized servers, or even simple metal servers.
Whenever a new instance is started, these scripts get the instance available for production, including the security arrangement tasks like installing intrusion detection agents, ensuring central authentication, and enabling multi-factor authentication.
3. Automate Deployments
Though automating deployments is one of the greatest practices in DevOps implementation, it can also develop an organization’s security position. In a zero-day vulnerability, deployment automation assures that modifications made to the DevOps tool script get deployed across each instance or server automatically. This makes it potential for a single system engineer to react to threats immediately.
4. Automate Security Monitoring
In the already growing trend of multi-cloud and hybrid environments that promote individual applications, it is important to monitor the entire infrastructure in a unique interface. During an occurrence of a security attack and downtime, it can be time-consuming and resource-draining to identify and fix the problem.
Automated security monitoring help engineers with the appropriate intelligence to address the attack and defend critical assets.
5. Get Set for the Future of Automation
Within the next few years, hybrid environments and data balloons will become mainstream, making the manual security program incompetent. So, now is the most suitable time to develop an internal automation team or outsource it. Although managing end-to-end process automation across hybrid environments may take months or even years, it will show infinitely more valuable than encouraging employees to decrease human error.
5 Stages of Cloud Security Automation Framework
Automation of cloud security includes a 5-step strategy as follows:
1. Monitor
Your cloud space will always scale to meet all the operational requirements. So, it’s essential to monitor the workflow of all the tasks in your cloud. This allows you to gain an understanding of how all workflow is carried out.
2. Evaluate
In the method of automating cloud security, knowing and prioritizing the tasks to automate is the first important step. Closely monitoring the workflows serves to evaluate tasks that should be automated, like the repeated tasks, deployments, resource provisioning, and creating security rules.
3. Analyze
Do an in-depth analysis of the gathered information based on severity as low, medium, or high chance. Then automate low-risk processes first, followed by high and medium. The in-depth study also helps you do control automation and consider the impact on infrastructure.
4. Automate and Report
The resulting study can now be pushed to combined systems to automate the workflows. Then configure the automation processes to create the reports that provide the overview of the changes before or after.
5. Remediate
By now, you will get a clear view of cloud automation, irrespective of whether you started automating easy workflows or complex ones. This allows you to implement remediation and improve the overall security posture.
How Businesses Benefit from Cloud Security Automation?
A constant, automated security protects your enterprise’s critical cloud assets from growing threats, as well as helps your company reap the following benefits:
- Minimized time spend on security operations
- Consistency in security operations
- Reduced manual errors
- Advanced security measures
- Enhanced compliance
- Rapidly identify and address security gaps
- Robust security posture
In Conclusion
Automation of cloud security gives a host of business benefits. However, it can be costly and complex than non-automated security. The technology requirements are expensive and require a significant amount of time to implement. Moreover, security automation increases the need for some highly skilled security expertise to set it up efficiently and maintain it.
Hence, if you are moving to the cloud or already in the cloud, partnering with a Cloud solutions provider like Baya Digital is the most effective option to secure your cloud-based systems with state-of-the-art security.
Baya Digital delivers highly effective and reliable cloud computing services that enable organizations to be agile and responsive to the evolving market landscape.