Proactive defence in the cloud security challenge

The acceleration of digital business initiatives has created a surge in the shift to cloud-based services but cyber security has not kept pace. This tipping point was amplified through the peak pandemic times with the reactive need for creating secure access and connectivity without boundaries.

However, as businesses have been migrating to cloud, not every deployment has been pain-free. Along with the organisational change and skills shortages they have experienced, threat actors have been taking advantage of this moment in time to disrupt.

Many of the ransomware breaches that we have seen recently have been due to the cloud attack surface expanding so quickly, without the necessary controls in place. As we have seen in recent high-profile breach events, many legacy security teams have been struggling to keep up with the more sophisticated advanced threats that we see.

Infrastructure sprawl now spans so many different cloud and edge locations, and so many different enclaves that each can have its own disparate requirements and security needs and demand for integration.

According to the 2022 Fortinet Networking and Cybersecurity Adoption Index, remote working remains a key vulnerability for organisations. While IT decision-makers are chiefly concerned with the threat of cybercrime, malicious employee action, operational technology and core to the edge, destructive ransomware, competitor espionage, unwitting employee action and state-based actors.

As we look forward to 2023, what can we address to minimise some of the potential inhibitors and roadblocks to security and agility in the cloud?

The War on Talent

A significant block to ensuring that security and development teams are delivering applications to keep up with incoming threat vectors is the lack of competencies required to cope. Many businesses have been dealing with a long-standing skills gap in security, which is now compounded by the fact that we are now enduring an overall cloud skills shortage. The two factors combined pose a major risk and transformation challenge.

Legacy SecOps

A default by-product of skills gaps can often be an accidental legacy security operations approach. This is where businesses are trying to apply legacy security practices to an advanced software-defined environment. Not only is this slowing down transformation initiatives, but also hampering the security team’s ability to identify and remediate threats.

Organisational Structure Challenge

CISOs, specifically have a challenge with cloud because they are often not directly aligned with the application delivery process. Often, the application delivery is done in a silo that does not always consider security. A key way to mitigate this is to align the CISO organisation with development teams who are delivering applications.

Key Takeaways:

Factor in security early in your cloud migrations and application architectures
Consider best practices security architectures when building environments
Start to align your application delivery teams with security delivery teams so that they can work more effectively together

The Fortinet Security Fabric Approach

Fortinet’s approach is via the Fortinet Security Fabric, created to address these complex challenges. The portfolio of more than 50 security and networking technologies are designed to interoperate and integrate; share threat intelligence, correlate data, and automatically respond to threats as a single, coordinated system.

Importantly, the fabric can also help solve the challenge highlighted above, and is built on three key attributes:

Broad – Detect threats and enforce security everywhere

Our broad portfolio includes converged networking and security offerings across endpoints, networks, and clouds. It enables high-performing connectivity and coordinated real-time threat detection and policy enforcement across the entire digital attack surface and lifecycle.

Integrated - Close security gaps and reduce complexity

Best-of-breed technologies are integrated with AI-powered centralized analysis and automated prevention. This delivers cohesive and consistent security, and simplified operations across different technologies, locations, and deployments.

Automated – Enable faster time-to-prevention and efficient operations

A context-aware, self-healing network and security posture leverages cloud-scale and advanced AI to automatically deliver near-real-time, user-to-application coordinated protection across the Fabric. Process automation simplifies operations for large-scale deployments and frees up IT teams, to focus on innovation.

To find out more about how to create the best cloud security environment visit Fortinet