As you consider your move to the cloud, protecting your data and network will be critical. An automated cloud-native security solution can help save your organization time, money and frustration.
Automation is the bedrock of innovation, allowing people to work smarter, not harder. In the cloud, automation simplifies security, so you can shift your focus from manual deployment of security for new infrastructure and time-consuming risk remediation tasks to better investigation and other security business transformation projects.
Its demand from security leaders reflects the importance of automation. According to a study by Fugue, 95% of the IT, cloud and security professionals surveyed said that security automation would enable them to be more efficient and make cloud-based data security more effective.
Benefits of cloud security automation
Aside from the obvious point that automation eliminates manual tasks, freeing you to focus on innovating, here’s how automation can help you get ahead:
- Minimizes misconfigurations: Human error remains the #1 cause of cloud misconfigurations. Automation eliminates the guesswork and human errors that can compromise your infrastructure.
- More resilience: Just like you wouldn’t go without home insurance, having a backup process is essential. By automating that process, you minimize recovery time and can limit the impacts of a breach.
- Fosters a DevSecOps culture by shifting left: By integrating automated scans and testing from the moment code is committed to the repository, you can ensure security from the very beginning of the build process right throughout the deployment.
- Accelerates compliance: When DevOps teams need to be as agile as possible, performing manual compliance audits is a no-go. By automating compliance scans continuously and security policies throughout the development process, you can make sure you’re demonstrating compliance without compromising build time.
Automation Use Cases
Securing user permissions is the first line of defense against data breaches. However, manually authorizing, tracking and de-provisioning access can be difficult, considering the sheer amount of cloud resources you have. Automation tools can streamline this process by allowing you to create permissions based on roles, enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) and requiring regular password rotation. Automation can also identify an overly permissive user and service accounts.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) quickly establishes a strong foundation for developers to build upon, versus the time-consuming alternative of manually building and configuring the infrastructure. This allows businesses to control changes and configurations in a cloud environment more efficiently. In addition, IaC offers DevOps practices that enable developers and operations to work more closely on the deployment of virtual machines, the virtual networks that are constructed around them and the application within.
Virtual patching is a safety measure against threats that exploit known and unknown vulnerabilities on affected servers and endpoints before the vendor patch is released. Virtual patching gives security teams the time to assess the vulnerability and test and apply the necessary and permanent patches. This saves you countless hours and potential system downtime from trying to locate and patch everything yourself manually.
Your Cloud Security Automation Toolkit
Automation is the key to a smooth, efficient and safe cloud migration. The security automation solution you choose should be able to handle the specific use cases above as well as:
- Discovery of workloads and cloud infrastructure across all the major cloud service providers (CSPs), including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform™.
- Continuous scanning and monitoring of IaC templates, instances, applications, cloud file storage, cloud networks and everything in between for vulnerabilities, malware and compliance risks. Automated scanning should also generate reports, logs and alerts so that you can stay on top of anything unusual.
- Detection and remediation of known and unknown vulnerabilities or risks to minimize disruption to workflows.
- Integration with your existing tool set for automated security deployment, policy configuration and management, health checks, incident response and more.
Trend Micro Cloud One is a cybersecurity platform solution that provides the breadth, depth and innovation required to meet and manage your cloud security need today and in the future. With seven cloud security components under the Cloud One umbrella, you can protect some aspects of your cloud environment or all of it. Trend Micro Cloud One allows you to secure workloads, containers, file storage, applications and your cloud network layer and ensure compliance and provide visibility and monitoring of open source vulnerabilities and license risks. Go hands-on and learn how to protect any or all of these elements with a free 30-day trial of Trend Micro Cloud One.
