What is Cloud Native Security?

Businesses are increasingly adopting cloud-native technology to bring in more efficiency, scalability, and innovation. But alongside these benefits, the cloud also introduces a new set of security risks and challenges, making robust cloud security a necessity. Thales’ Cloud Security Report found that 65% of respondents reveal cloud security to be their top concern with 44% having experienced a cloud data breach.

Given the pressing need for comprehensive strategies to proactively manage risks around cloud-native infrastructure and apps from cyberattacks, we’ve written this article on cloud-native security and its significance, core principles, challenges, and best practices.

What Is Cloud-Native Security?

Cloud-native security encompasses a set of security practices and tools specifically designed to defend applications developed and deployed in cloud environments from cyber threats. This approach marks a shift from traditional security methods designed for static apps to security techniques tailored for the cloud’s ephemeral environment where resources are spun up, scaled or deleted at the drop of a hat.

Cloud-native applications comprise a variety of loosely connected resources—such as containers, databases, microservices, Kubernetes orchestration platforms, APIs, and serverless architectures—that a single security tool cannot cover. As such, cloud-native cybersecurity unites a broad range of security tools, including CSPM, CWPP, and IaC solutions, into one cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) to safeguard cloud resources from threats using cloud-native security measures.

Protecting cloud-native software will include security measures like:

• Implementing secure API gateways between microservices
• Regularly scanning container images for vulnerabilities
• Encrypting data in transit and at rest
• Using runtime protection to detect and respond to threats in real-time

These measures, and more, address the unique security challenges of distributed, containerized architectures, ensuring that each component of the application is protected while maintaining the flexibility and scalability benefits of the cloud-native design.

Importance of Cloud-Native Security

As businesses increasingly depend on cloud-native apps, they are faced with new and complex security concerns ranging from data theft and exposure to DDoS risks and more. Cloud-native security integrates security into the software development process to address these risks. Cloud-native security platforms offer real-time threat and anomaly detection capabilities specifically designed for cloud-native infrastructure, ensuring proactive and adaptive security.

They speed up incident response by providing actionable recommendations for issues detected.  When AI and ML capabilities are integrated into these platforms, they automate security risk prediction and response.

Additionally, cloud-native security platforms enforce strict access control policies, safeguard secrets, and implement encryption, thereby ensuring cloud-native data security and preventing unauthorized access and manipulation. They also help organizations in various industries maintain compliance with the requisite regulatory standards including GDPR, PCI DSS, DORA, and more.

Consider a healthcare organization transitioning to a cloud-native electronic health record (EHR) system. Cloud-native security is critical here for:

• Ensuring patient data confidentiality and integrity
• Maintaining compliance with regulations like HIPAA
• Protecting against ransomware attacks that could disrupt critical healthcare services
• Enabling secure access for healthcare providers across multiple locations

This example illustrates how cloud-native security is not just about protecting data, but also about ensuring the continuity of essential services and maintaining trust with customers and regulatory bodies.

Key Elements of Cloud-Native Security

Before security, operations, and development teams can roll out more effective cloud-native security solutions, they need to first get a handle on the key elements involved. These include:

• Inventory and classification: You can’t protect what you can’t see. Having an accurate inventory and proper classification of all assets is crucial to ensure security teams can identify any potential vulnerabilities across the software stack.
• Compliance management: It’s important that systems are built to consistently meet industry and legal regulations. This means sticking to standard configurations, security best practices, and using trusted registries to stay compliant.
• Network security: Securing assets and network traffic requires analyzing all traffic flows. The goal here is to make sure that the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your systems and information stay intact.
• Identity and Access Management (IAM) security: Limiting cloud access to the right individuals is a must. This includes activities like access governance, privileged monitoring, and user behavior analytics (UEBA) powered by machine learning.
• Data security: Protecting stored data involves classifying it correctly, preventing data loss, and scanning for malware in cloud storage.
• Vulnerability management: You’ll need to keep an eye on vulnerabilities throughout the entire application lifecycle. This includes continuously monitoring all hosts, images, and functions in the cloud.
• Workload security: Every workload in the cloud needs protection. This improves visibility across workloads and should include vulnerability scanning and runtime security.
• Automated investigation and response: Ideally, your security tools should offer automatic remediation, integrate with your security operations center (SOC), and work with third-party tools when necessary.
• Cloud-native incident response: Given the distributed nature of the cloud and the expansive attack surface due to the presence of numerous microservices, workloads, and shadow IT, a cloud-native incident detection and response system will help you manage and respond to attacks more effectively.

Key Components to Secure in Cloud Native Architectures

Cloud-native security involves safeguarding all components of the cloud-native security architecture. Most security misconfigurations happen here. Verizon’s Data Breach Report reveals that misconfigurations are the third leading cause of security breaches. Thus, it is essential for cybersecurity professionals to learn about the nature of these components.

1. Microservices and API security

A microservices architecture is made up of small, loosely connected services that are each responsible for separate business functions. Securing microservices means safeguarding the services themselves, the APIs with which they communicate, and the sensitive data that goes back and forth between these services when they communicate.

Here’s an example to better illustrate microservices and APIs. Consider a cloud-native banking application with various services, including one for managing customer banking details like PINs, credit card numbers, and the like; and another for performing online transactions like funds transfers and utility bill payments. When a customer attempts to transfer funds, the account management microservice must verify the PIN entered before authorizing the transaction. This information is transferred back and forth via APIs.

Cloud-native security protects these services, the APIs, as well as the PINs, credit card numbers, and other sensitive data transferred between them from unauthorized access. This involves implementing strong authentication mechanisms, encrypting data in transit, and regularly auditing access logs. It also includes protecting API gateways against DDoS and injection attacks with strong authentication, rate limiting, and input validation output.

2. Container Security

Containers allow software to be quickly packaged and moved across different environments. Container security involves scanning container images for vulnerabilities before they are deployed. It also includes monitoring containers and container image registries at runtime to ensure they run with the least privileges necessary.

Cloud-native security ensures that no container has root privileges, unless absolutely necessary. This effectively cuts unauthorized access to containers and their hosts. It equally prevents attackers from gaining write access to the container’s filesystem, safeguarding your stack from the injection of malicious or rogue containers.

3. Orchestration Security

Orchestration tools automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containers throughout their lifecycle. Orchestration security involves protecting Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and other orchestration platforms – as well as the clusters and pods therein – from security risks.

This can be done by implementing role-based access control (RBAC) and network policies to control inter-pod communication. Orchestration security prevents unauthorized access to cluster resources and limits the potential spread of attacks within the cluster.

4. Serverless Security

Serverless platforms like Google Cloud Functions and AWS Lambda offer ephemeral architectures that reduce the attack surface due to their statelessness. Despite the lack of a persistent state which makes them less vulnerable than their stateful counterparts, serverless apps still require security controls.

Serverless security comprises function-level permissions for identity and access control and dependency management for preventing the use of vulnerable third-party dependencies in cloud-native apps. Another important component of serverless security is event-driven security, which monitors and logs the events that trigger serverless functions to uncover suspicious behavior in real time.

5. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security

IaC involves writing machine-readable policies that define how cloud resources, including servers, networks, and storage, should be provisioned and configured. Unfortunately, these coded policies can accidentally introduce misconfigurations (such as exposed S3 buckets or misconfigured access controls) and other security vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit in ransomware, data theft, and DDoS attacks.  To combat this, IaC security scans IaC templates in platforms like AWS CloudFormation, Azure ARM, and Terraform to detect and resolve security and version control issues before infrastructure is deployed.

6. CI/CD Pipeline Security

The CI/CD pipeline is the backbone of cloud-native software development. It includes a series of automated processes DevOps engineers use to build, test, and deploy apps. CI/CD security refers to scanning code and code repos for hard-coded credentials, misconfiguration, and other vulnerabilities introduced by insecure coding practices. Another aspect of CI/CD security is pipeline hardening, which protects the CI/CD infrastructure from unauthorized users by limiting access, safeguarding deployment keys, and more.

The 4 Cs of Cloud-Native Security

To develop an effective cloud-native security strategy, you must understand the four layers of the cloud-native infrastructure—code, container, cluster, and cloud—and how to secure them.

1. Code: The code or application layer has the largest attack surface and requires the highest level of security controls. Typical security issues at the code layer include insecure code, insufficient risk assessments, cyber threats targeting app-to-server communication, and vulnerabilities in third-party software dependencies.

To minimize these security threats, adopt secure coding practices, and use static code analysis (SCA) tools to identify and eliminate vulnerable third-party components. Additionally, scan first and third-party software regularly to detect code vulnerabilities and software supply chain risks early. Adopt transport layer security (TLS), and restrict exposed API endpoints, ports, and services to prevent malicious traffic from accessing your apps. This will ensure resilience against man-in-the-middle (MITM), cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks.

2. Container: At this stage, secure code (that is if security has been successfully implemented at the code layer) is containerized. Common vulnerabilities associated with this layer include using container images from unverified sources, weak privilege setups, and others discussed under container security above. Container risks can be handled by scanning containers and hosts for known vulnerabilities and enforcing IAM and least privilege.

3. Cluster: The cluster layer manages your container orchestration platform’s state. In Kubernetes, cluster security comprises protecting the control plane and worker nodes, and their components, e.g. the kube-api-server —the primary Kubernetes interface, and kubeadm join—responsible for adding nodes to existing clusters.

Common cluster security risks include misconfiguring clusters, using default configuration, and not encrypting communication. Improve cluster security by implementing TLS to encrypt communication between Kubernetes components. Additionally, enforce cluster authentication and authorization via RBAC, and implement pod and network security policies.

4. Cloud: The cloud layer is where applications run. Due to the cloud’s borderlessness, it is also the most complex to secure. When you set up a server with a cloud service provider (CSP), most of the infrastructure security responsibilities are your provider’s. However, you are responsible for configuring the services, protecting your information, and managing security within your cloud environment.

Typical cloud layer security vulnerabilities include automated assaults and misconfigurations. Misconfigurations, including unmodified default settings or lax access controls to the management console, can be exploited by attackers. Leverage security information and event management (SIEM) and cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools embedded within CNAPPs to automate vulnerability detection in your cloud.

Cloud-Native Security Strategies

A few cloud-native security strategies have gained traction recently, each offering varying levels of effectiveness:

• Shared Responsibility Models: In this model, cloud providers are in charge of securing the infrastructure, while customers are responsible for securing their own applications, data, and access. It’s the foundation for most modern cloud-native security strategies.
• Multi-Layered Security: Cloud services generally consist of seven layers: facility, network, hardware, OS, middleware, application, and user. Multi-layered security monitors all these layers to detect risks and mitigate vulnerabilities. While this approach uses various tools like cloud-aware firewalls and end-to-end encryption, managing so many tools can become a hassle.
• Cloud-Agnostic Security Platforms: The most effective strategy is to use cloud-agnostic security platforms. These platforms offer visibility across multiple ecosystems, reducing dependency on specific cloud vendors, and helping overburdened security teams streamline alerts and tools.

Implementing a Cloud-Native Security

To safeguard cloud-native environments, enterprises must develop a cloud-native security strategy that prioritizes security best practices (discussed below) and adopts a myriad of tactics, including the following :

• Security by Design: This strategy bakes software security into the software development life cycle (SDLC), rather than making it an afterthought. It involves using only secure software components, adopting security best practices, and implementing DevSecOps to make IT teams more accountable and focused on building resilient, vulnerability-free apps.
• Shift-Left Security: Shifting security to the left of the SDLC involves securing apps from the outset of the project, and represents a shift from models where security tests were run after apps had been fully built. It typically requires adopting cloud-native security tools equipped with the ability to scan app code for vulnerabilities before the code is shipped. This technique catches vulnerabilities early, improves the cloud-native environment’s overall security posture, and reduces the cost of remediating risks.
• Zero-Trust Security: This model assumes that no entity—whether coming from within or outside your network—is inherently trustworthy. It verifies every user and service access request and ensures that even if one part of your system gets compromised, the attack does not lead to the complete breakdown of your entire stack. This way, zero trust minimizes the cost of attacks and improves customer trust.
• Cloud-native security tools: The best cloud-native security tools provide a comprehensive solution for monitoring, automated vulnerability scanning and reporting, compliance, and governance. Leveraging these tools can help you automate many aspects of cloud security such as log analysis, vulnerability scanning, reporting, and compliance policy enforcement. CNAPP solutions like Sentinel One provide a holistically integrated solution ensuring cost-effective and resilient cloud security.

Top Security Concerns for Cloud-Native Systems

Cloud-native environments pose a number of  security risks:

• Increased attack surface: As more microservices and components exist, there are also more potential security gaps. The attack surface increases with the number of components and configurations, making it easier for attackers to identify entry points into the system. It is essential to manage and secure each of these components to lower the risk of breaches.

• Adaptable and transient nature: Maintaining consistent security in cloud-native environments might be challenging due to their constantly shifting nature. Just when you think you have gotten it all secured, righted all misconfigurations, discovered and encrypted all data. An old pod and its accompanying storage get destroyed, new data makes it into your systems, new storage configurations are required, and the cycle begins again and again. Maintaining uniform security standards and visibility throughout such an environment can be a showstopper.

• Misconfigurations: Security lapses may result from improperly configured components. Because cloud-native systems are so complicated, it is easy to make mistakes when configuring cloud resources, network security, access controls, or encryption, opening the system up to attacks. It is imperative to have appropriate configuration management and automated checks in place to reduce this risk.

• Supply chain risks: Security issues may arise due to flaws in external components. These components can introduce vulnerabilities if they are not adequately vetted or contain malicious code. Supply chain attacks, where attackers compromise a trusted third-party component, can devastate the entire system’s security.

Unfortunately, resolving these risks is not as easy as simply implementing cloud-native security strategies. For one, the cloud is borderless, meaning that, unlike traditional environments, you cannot simply secure a prespecified perimeter and rest easily. This also makes complete visibility cumbersome; without being able to tell exactly how cloud resources are configured, where they are, where data is, who is accessing what, and what they are doing with this access, securing cloud-native apps is near impossible. This is where adopting the right tools and best practices come in.

6 Cloud-Native Security Best Practices

To overcome these challenges, organizations should follow these best practices:

#1 Adopt a DevSecOps Culture

Rather than implementing security post-software deployment, integrate security into all DevOps processes. This requires integrating security tools into the CI/CD pipeline and encouraging collaboration between development, operations, and security teams. Adopting a DevSecOps culture ensures that security vulnerabilities in your code are detected early, before deployment, facilitating faster and more secure software release cycles. For example, with a DevSecOps culture in place, when a developer writes code and commits it to Git Hub, a scan is automatically triggered to discover any vulnerabilities in the CI process.

#2 Implement Continuous Compliance

The cloud’s elasticity allows resources to change rapidly in response to evolving demands. As these rapid changes mean that vulnerability can be introduced at any time, security and governance teams must continuously audit configurations and infrastructure for compliance with security standards such as PCI DSS and HIPAA. Cloud-native security tools can help automate these checks and alert your teams to policy violations in real-time.

#3 Use AI and Automation

AI-driven tools are equipped with machine learning capabilities that help them learn your unique business environment and security requirements. These tools continuously monitor changes in your environment to detect anomalies and potential security threats that may go undetected by traditional tools. For example, AI-driven tools can detect wrongly segregated data that might lead to data exposure, and automate remediation measures.

#4 Regularly Update Security Policies

Threat actors are always developing new TTPs and hunting for new vulnerabilities, so it’s important to review and update policies regularly to keep up with the changing threat landscape. Your Kubernetes setup, for instance, may require network policy adjustments to address zero-day vulnerabilities.

#5 Encrypt Sensitive Data

Encrypt data at rest and in transit, and safeguard encryption keys in secrets management systems. Use secure communication protocols like TLS and HTTPS to encrypt data in transit.

#6 Educate Employees

Train IT engineers to adopt a security-first mindset where everyone—Devs, Ops, and security teams—works towards securing cloud-native apps.

Cloud-Native Security with SentinelOne

SentinelOne Cloud Native Security (CNS) is an agentless CNAPP designed to detect potential vulnerabilities in your cloud-native environments before they become critical issues.

A Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) is a comprehensive security solution designed to safeguard cloud-native applications. Built on microservice architecture, these applications typically run in containerized environments like Kubernetes, OpenShift, or Docker. CNAPP provides a holistic approach to security, ensuring protection throughout the entire application lifecycle—from development to production.

With our AI-driven approach, SentinelOne offers unmatched code-to-cloud visibility, real-time insights into risks and attack paths, and actionable remediation steps. Our solution integrates seamlessly with various technologies, CI pipelines, and all major CSPs, including Azure, GCP, AWS, and Alibaba Cloud, offering you a single-pane view of everything going on in your single, hybrid or multi-cloud environment.

The landscape of cloud security is vast and varied, incorporating a range of specialized tools designed to protect and manage an organization’s data and infrastructure in the cloud. Here’s a breakdown of some crucial tools and their functions:

1. CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management): This tool continuously monitors cloud configurations to spot and correct misconfigurations that might lead to security breaches, ensuring compliance with security policies and regulations.
2. CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platform): CWPP safeguards various workloads across the cloud, including virtual machines (VMs), containers, and serverless operations. It provides critical runtime security and threat detection to protect against potential vulnerabilities.
3. CDR (Cloud Detection and Response): This technology plays a crucial role in cloud security by actively detecting, investigating, and responding to threats in real-time, which helps minimize the time attackers spend within the environment and prevents potential breaches.
4. AI-SPM (AI-Driven Security Posture Management): Leveraging artificial intelligence, AI-SPM automatically analyzes and optimizes security settings across cloud environments, ensuring that security measures adapt dynamically to new threats and changes within the cloud.
5. CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management): CIEM helps manage and secure access in cloud environments by controlling permissions and policies, reducing the risk associated with excessively privileged accounts that could be exploited by attackers.
6. EASM (External Attack Surface Management): EASM identifies vulnerabilities in an organization’s externally facing cloud assets. By managing these vulnerabilities, it helps minimize the risks associated with potential external attacks.
7. IaC Scanning (Infrastructure as Code Scanning): This tool scans the code that defines infrastructure to ensure that security issues are identified and resolved before the infrastructure is provisioned, enhancing security from the very start of resource deployment.
8. KSPM (Kubernetes Security Posture Management): Specific to Kubernetes environments, KSPM monitors and enforces security best practices and configurations within Kubernetes clusters, helping maintain compliance and safeguard against misconfiguration.

Conclusion

Understanding how cloud-native security works and the key components you have to focus on securing will ensure you create an airtight cloud environment where data is constantly monitored, vulnerabilities are identified proactively, and proper incident response mechanisms are applied.

After you thoroughly understand the 4C’s of cloud-native security, apply the strategies we’ve shared. Also, stay informed of the latest security threats and vulnerabilities. Review and update your security policies to meet the needs of the hour so that your strategies work despite new changes in cloud technologies and the varying nature of the threats

Without this knowledge, organizations generally risk data breaches, compliance failures, and potential service interruptions that can severely impact operations and erode customer trust. Remember, cloud-native security isn’t just about deploying tools; it’s about integrating security into your development process and ensuring every component of your cloud environment is shielded against evolving cyber threats.

If you aren’t quite sure of ensuring security, use a comprehensive agentless CNAPP solution like Sentinel One. Sentinel One acts as a one-stop shop for all your cloud security needs be it single, hybrid, or multi-cloud environments. Request a demo to see SentinelOne CNS in action.

FAQs

1. What is Cloud-Native with an example?

Cloud-native refers to applications designed to leverage cloud computing architectures such as microservices, containerization, and more. Netflix’s streaming service exemplifies a cloud-native architecture. It utilizes microservices for user authentication, content delivery, and the like. Each of these services is containerized for portability and is dynamically orchestrated to scale resources on demand.

2. What are the Cloud-Native security principles?

Cloud-native security principles encompass various security best practices that enterprises can adopt to build secure-by-design apps. These include shift-left security, zero-trust, defense-in-depth, data encryption, and more.

3. What is the best tool for Cloud-Native Security?

The most effective tool for cloud-native security is SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Native Security. With support for tens of compliance standards, more than 2,000 built-in misconfiguration checks, and a powerful OSE that eliminates false positives out-of-the-box, SentinelOne stands out as the best cloud-native security solution to have in your arsenal.

4. What is the difference between cloud and cloud-native?

Cloud refers to using remote servers hosted on the internet for storage, management, and processing of data, accessible anywhere. Cloud-native, on the other hand, describes applications specifically built to run in cloud environments, leveraging microservices, containers, and dynamic orchestration. While the cloud is infrastructure-focused, cloud-native emphasizes application design optimized for cloud scalability and flexibility.