A few years ago, it seemed that all conversation was focused on moving to the cloud. Today, the conversation has evolved to highlighting the strategies employed by cloud customers. Given the flexibility of the public cloud, the definition of security continues to evolve. One result of that flexibility is that effective cloud security becomes dependent on your organization’s definition of cloud and the operational model chosen to build and manage your environments. For example, some consider the cloud to be solely Infrastructure-as-a-Service. For others, it’s strictly Platform-as-a-Service. It’s important to understand what your scope will be when developing security controls and identifying what to monitor, and more importantly, how to respond.
In the whitepaper Evolution of Security in the Public Cloud, written by GuidePoint Security’s Cloud Security Practice Director Jonathan Villa, we examine how cloud security has evolved over the past decade, and help you better understand cloud native services and third-party cloud options.
Cloud security continues to evolve through the release of new cloud native services, the reinvention of security platforms, and the birth of new technologies that provide best-of-breed cloud security solutions.
Today, we’re relearning that managing the cloud includes more of the traditional role-based approach. Not from a human perspective, but from the perspective of identifying roles and their capabilities, regardless of whether it’s a human or if it’s an EC2 instance role or Lambda function.
Generally speaking, the two approaches to cloud security are detective measures and preventative measures. Both have value depending on your architecture and operational model. Cloud security is strongest when automation is leveraged. Automation involves both detective and preventive measures. Read more about this in the whitepaper Evolution of Security in the Public Cloud, which will also show you how vendors reinvented traditional platforms to meet the speed of cloud delivery models, and how the cloud has redefined the perimeter.
