The 5 C's of Cloud-Native Security: Key Challenges and How to Address Them

Challenges: Multi-cloud environments present significant difficulties in ensuring continuous infrastructure security, compliance assurance, and data protection due to complexity, limited visibility, non-standardization, and human error-related misconfigurations. Misconfigured cloud environments have resulted in several high-profile data breaches and cyberattacks.

Solution: Solutions that continuously scan cloud deployments and automatically detect design flaws, lack of encryption, and container or cluster security issues should be prioritized to prevent misconfigurations and address breaches quickly.

Challenges: Vulnerabilities in container images, Container runtime security, lack of visibility into the entire container environment and misconfigurations and human error are often the most cited challenges in container security.

Solution: When it comes to securing containerized applications in the cloud, organizations need to be thorough. This means using secure coding practices, managing access controls, segmenting the network, and using automated scanning tools to detect vulnerabilities. It's also important to use solutions that can enforce security policies for each container, which can prevent downtime caused by security issues.

Challenges: Kubernetes clusters are critical in cloud-native environments, but they are vulnerable to security risks despite the robust security features provided. Misconfigurations and software vulnerabilities can lead to attackers gaining access to sensitive data, applications, or infrastructure. Recently, researchers found nearly one million exposed and misconfigured Kubernetes instances that could result in breaches¹. 

Solution: When you move to containerization and microservices, you need to make sure you have identity-based security solutions in place. This means setting up access controls and keeping an eye on what's happening with Kubernetes so you can detect and respond to threats quickly. It's important to secure the Kubernetes control plane using role-based access controls (RBAC) which limit access to the API server and other resources, giving you more control over who can do what.

Challenges: Cloud-native applications, with frequent code deployments and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and open-source software (OSS) adoption, can introduce vulnerabilities that can be exploited. In fact, 69% of organizations use IaC templates for cloud infrastructure provisioning, and 83% experience misconfigurations as development scales, as per a recent ESG report. Security teams face challenges with OSS and struggle to detect and address vulnerabilities due to limited visibility into APIs and cloud workloads.

Solution: Integrate security throughout the development lifecycle with DevSecOps. Use container-specific security tools and cloud-native solutions for scalability, automation, and agility. Avoid legacy solutions that cannot meet the scalability, resiliency, automation, and agility requirements of modern cloud applications. Consider observability solutions that provide a comprehensive view of vulnerabilities and security gaps.

Challenges: Compliance in cloud-native security can be a struggle due to limited visibility in highly dynamic and heterogeneous environments, making it difficult to identify and enforce compliance controls, track compliance requirements, monitor controls, and prove compliance to auditors, especially for regulated industries.

Solution: It should be noted that relying solely on compliance solutions provided by cloud security providers is not enough. Explore compliance solutions that provide log monitoring, threat detection, and automated incident response capabilities to adhere to compliance and regulatory frameworks. Use a security-by-design approach to integrate security into the entire development cycle, including the DevOps pipeline, and use automation to enforce security policies.