How Application Security Should Work For Modern Cloud Environments

Categories of Cloud Computing

SaaS

This is called software as a service (SaaS). It is kind of like Hotmail, Gmail, or Office 365. Everything is provided through a web browser, and nothing to install and you use it. The Cloudnosys SaaS platform safeguards your cloud against vulnerabilities and provides total visibility, control over cloud security, and compliance in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platforms. Facebook, DropBox, and Google Docs are good examples of SaaS platforms.

PaaS

This is called platform as a service (PaaS). It is like renting a server, and you install software on it. PaaS has been around for as long as web hosting companies such as GoDaddy, where you do not have to buy a server.

IaaS

This is called Infrastructure as a service which is a complete solution. This provides you with an entire network virtually hosted on somebody’s cloud. You have a virtual control panel, and you would never have to install wires or configure anything except through the virtual software portal.

Essential Cloud Service Characteristics

In Cloud Computing, there are five essential cloud characteristics which are as follows:

On-Demand Self Service

It’s like selecting things from a menu; we can say a vending machine or subscribing to a server service. Like in Azure, you can use their control panel and sign up for a server that is small and free to very real, robust, on-demand, and expensive.

Global Access

It costs a lot of money for a cloud company to develop because they have so many data centers.

Shared Resource Pool

A massive data center is built and shared among thousands of customers. A large group of servers is shared among a group of clients.

Dynamic Growth

You can expand your service and shrink it depending on the needs of your current processes. If there is some new product or something new in the news that happens to be lucky to hit your company, you don’t have to worry about purchasing servers that might sit idle in the future, so dynamic growth is a crucial feature of cloud computing.

Measured Service with Pay Per Use

It’s like a measurement meter. How much will you pay based on how many users you get or how much traffic is hitting your website?

Security Pitfalls in a Hybrid Environment

The cloud environment where all of this runs on whether we are talking about Amazon, Azure, or Google. The actual cloud supporting your application is a vector of attack. The single sign-on part of these systems, called IAM, would allow an attacker to access the environment that is controlling your environment. There certainly are people in businesses who have dedicated a hundred percent to one cloud platform or technology stack, but in practice, many other things tie into this. Third-party APIs like a platform called Lambda, a serverless environment in Amazon. There are integrations with third-party services like Zendesk. You have things like GitHub and GitLab. All these things are other vectors in this environment because these move at such a speed that you have to leverage many of these different APIs and other components into the atmosphere.

The ability to monitor the data across all components is unique. It may spread across many different parts if we are dealing with sensitive data that’s personally identifiable information like personal health information or personal account numbers in the case of financial data when it comes to the fact that the data itself is spread across shared storage and multiple volumes and that sort of thing on the actual deployment side just having part of the security stack focused on code review and code testing in the continuous integration system doesn’t give you much coverage.

Critical Application Migration Challenges

One of the ways that we deal with the speed problem or advantage is by building the security itself into the development and operations process. We build applications in that space when we are in a GitLab or GitHub environment. We make the testing into our pipelines. It’s a way of automating many deployment steps, testing, bundling deploying into the application before it is pushed into the cloud environment. Moving applications that are not built that way is a fairly significant task. You must identify all the data points, where they come from, and where you can make these controls around them.

The various regulatory frameworks that handle this PCI, HIPPA, or GDPR, some of these may have conflicting requirements like stringent levels of auditing. So, that alone can introduce some complexity to the way that this is done.

Application security is essential because a hundred percent of applications today have some vulnerability. Security people are in demand, and this skill set is not something you will show up with experience. Every day the security threat gets more prominent, and the number of people that handle that doesn’t change. We grow a little, but humans do not scale to the level of threat as it stands. Globally gain visibility and control of all your security threats, vulnerabilities, configurations, risks, policies, and user activities with Cloudnosys. Our feature EagleEye dynamically remediates and heals your cloud using best practice standards to ensure compliance with little effort.

Cloud Security Made Simple

Cloudnosys platform delivers security, compliance, and DevOps automation. Continually scan your entire AWS services for security and compliance violations for Network Security, IAM Policies, VPC, S3, Cloudtrail etc.

Cloud Security. Compliance.

Request a free demo with our specialist to discover Cloudnosys helps govern cloud usage for security, compliance, and cost management.