Cloud security remains a major concern for SMEs around the world. Some experts have trivialized the issues. A study from Gartner states that 95% of cloud security issues will be the fault of the customers through 2022. However, some of the risks on the enterprise side are significant enough to warrant concern.
TechBeacon has stated that organizations need to be especially careful about ensuring the security of cloud apps. Even major companies are at risk. In fact, 70% of financial companies on the Fortune 500 can be found on the deep web and accessed by hackers. The threat to small businesses is even bigger, since they have less sophisticated cloud security.
Whether we’re storing personal data or business data on the cloud, there’s an element of outsourced trust that we have in the processes that we believe guard our data from negative actors, hackers and cybercriminals. The world of business and commerce is especially vulnerable to cyberattacks, given the fact that one vulnerability in a system of data management, storage and transference might mean a weak spot that becomes a gateway for your data to seep through. This article is all about the things you should be looking out for to protect your applications that are built using container technologies.
Understand the System
The first tip here is to grasp a basic understanding of the system that you’re dealing with in order to build upon that protocol for checking and updating your own storage data and systems. This means having visibility into all of your container assets, including the orchestrator. As the most popular orchestrator in the market, Kubernetes is a widely used platform for managing cloud-based containerized application development and deployment. Its popularity also means securing Kubernetes is a key concern for business running their mission critical apps in the cloud. Familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of Kubernetes.
Vulnerability Spotting
Now that you’ve gained a solid understanding of how exactly Kubernetes works, it’s time to consider how you might be able to spot the vulnerabilities in the system that you manage and use on a day-to-day basis. Let’s look at some basic questions to help you get started:
- Which environment handles sensitive/regulated date, and are there any components that contain vulnerabilities?
- If yes, how severe are these vulnerabilities and where are they?
- What’s the network exposure look like for this vulnerable component?
- Is this a fixable vulnerability, and if not, how can you make changes to isolate the vulnerable systems?
Only through the measured consideration of these questions can you start to properly secure your cloud-based application workload.
Looking at Privilege
Some of your containers in your Kubernetes clusters might have a privileged status – and this means they’ll have full access to the host operating system. This is a big no-no as a security best practice, and should be considered a short-cut to keeping your own environment safe.
Identifying Suspicious Clusters
Another way to spot vulnerability is in taking a stroll through all of your digital clusters in order to find those which seem suspicious, unused, duplicated or otherwise surplus to requirements. Remove these with extreme prejudice – but only after confirming that they are useless for your current business operations.
Application Management Across Teams
As you and your team will know, the cloud isn’t just a useful store of some of your business documents and data – it’s also where some of the most exciting apps and plug-ins that your business enjoys using are stored. As such, liaison with external teams and your internal teams that manage different processes – and the management of these applications – will help you bolster your security. This means ensuring that security knows what apps are being built and deployed, and where the security holes might reside.
Setting Some Standards
The world of cybersecurity already boasts an impressive array of standards that can help you be sure that you’re protecting your workload on the cloud. Make sure that your clusters, namespaces and nodes are all adhering to CIS benchmarks. You will need these compliance levels ascertained in order to further map vulnerabilities and priority levels moving forward.
Here you have it – six of the key ways to assess, manage and protect your cloud-based data.