India’s digital economy is set to surge from $200 billion in 2017-18 to an impressive $1 trillion by 2025. With the growing size of the digital population and the economy’s upward trajectory, the demand for Data Centres is increasing rapidly. Cloud computing in India has evolved beyond just being a facilitator—it has become a key driver of innovation, flexibility, and business growth. A report by Oliver Wyman and NASSCOM indicates that cloud technology could represent 8% of India’s GDP by 2026. It has the potential to contribute $310-380 billion to the GDP by 2026 and create 14 million jobs.
However, as cloud adoption goes up, Cloud security has emerged as a critical concern for organizations worldwide. As cloud technologies continue to be adopted at an accelerated pace, businesses face new layers of complexity. In fact, 73% of professionals acknowledge that cloud technology has heightened this complexity. Consequently, enhancing cyber resiliency to safeguard these environments is more crucial than ever. By taking proactive measures and integrating robust security frameworks, organizations can effectively manage risks without sacrificing the inherent advantages of cloud platforms.
According to Check Point’s 2024 Cloud Security Report a critical surge in cloud security incidents, marking a significant increase from 24% in 2023 to 61% in 2024, a whopping 154% increase, highlight the escalating complexity and frequency of cloud threats. In fact, as per a recent PWC Survey, 52% Indian organisations are the most concerned around cloud related threats.
Understanding Cyber Resiliency in the Cloud
Cyber resiliency extends beyond traditional defense mechanisms, focusing on maintaining operational continuity even during security incidents. According to a recent survey, 95% of companies express significant concern about cloud security, underscoring the urgency of implementing resilient strategies. In the cloud, this involves developing a robust framework designed to anticipate and mitigate potential threats. Such a framework enables organizations to swiftly recover from disruptions and sustain business operations. This proactive approach includes continuous monitoring, threat intelligence integration, and automated response mechanisms. By building a resilient cloud infrastructure, businesses can address vulnerabilities more effectively and minimize the impact of security breaches.
Preventing Attacks by Closing Entry Points
Prevention is foundational to cyber resiliency and starts with closing potential entry points that could introduce vulnerabilities. Real-time prevention and the implementation of a Zero Trust security model are essential for a comprehensive defense-in-depth strategy.
Real-Time and Inline Prevention on the Network and Workload
- Perimeter Security: Implement network threat prevention at the cloud’s perimeter, particularly where it interfaces with the internet and cloud services accessible to developers and contractors.
- AI-Powered Protection: Cloud environments require advanced AI-powered tools that can analyze patterns and behaviors to detect and prevent zero-day attacks. These tools offer significant cost savings and faster remediation compared to traditional security measures.
Workload Security: While agentless solutions for VMs and containers offer simplicity, deploying agent-based prevention for critical applications is crucial to block hackers from injecting malicious code.
Zero Trust Security
- Unified Policy Across Environments: Implement a unified Zero Trust policy across all cloud environments, whether public, private, or Kubernetes. Consistency is essential.
- Adaptive Policies Based on Identities: Shift from IP-based policies to those built around user, cloud object, and application identities to adapt to changing environments.
Enhanced CNAPP with Preventive Context
- Toxic Combination Detection: Use CNAPPs to detect combinations of risks that represent severe threats, thereby reducing alert fatigue and improving prioritization.
- Misconfiguration Management: Automated tools should ensure configurations align with security best practices, significantly reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
- Entitlement Management: Evaluate native entitlement policies alongside security groups and access policies to prioritize alerts that truly matter.
These measures collectively fortify the cloud environment, making it more resilient against potential attacks.
Balancing Security with Agility and Scalability
Achieving the right balance between security and the agility and scalability of cloud environments is challenging but essential. The cloud’s dynamic nature allows businesses to innovate rapidly, but it also requires robust security measures. Organizations can maintain this balance by deploying advanced threat detection and response tools. Security should also start in the development phase, with thorough code scanning across CI/CD pipelines to detect vulnerabilities and identify sensitive data early. By adopting a security-first mindset, businesses can protect their cloud infrastructure while leveraging its potential for growth and innovation.
Managing Risks Within the Cloud Environment
To effectively manage risks in the cloud, organizations need a multi-faceted strategy which leverages AI and Machine Learning to help identify and prioritize risk. This will allow you to identify security vulnerabilities more quickly in your cloud environment that could be most critical, and then leverage a detailed remediation plan to eliminate the risk, enabling quicker responses. Automation in this step can truly help close skills and resource gaps within already constrained security organizations by firstly, limiting the number of threats that can permeate the environment and secondly, prioritizing the risks that remain.
In fact, according to the recent IBM Security Cost of a Data Breach 2024 study organizations who used AI in their risk mitigation for prevention had the greatest reduction related to the cost per breach with a $2.2M savings and reduced the time to remediate by 100 days compared to traditional security measures focused on detection/remediation.
Addressing Compliance and Governance Challenges
Navigating the complex landscape of compliance and governance in the cloud can be daunting, especially when it comes to ensuring compliance measures are consistently applied across the cloud environment, sensitive data is protected, policies are adhered to, and systems do not go adrift. Automated compliance management tools, like a CSPM, provide real-time monitoring and reporting to ensure adherence to regulatory standards and that those are applied across the cloud environment. These tools are critical to high fidelity posture management to automatically and continuously check for misconfigurations that can lead to data breaches and costly fines.
Securing Code in the Cloud
As organizations increasingly rely on cloud environments for application development, securing code becomes paramount. Emphasizing secure coding practices helps identify vulnerabilities early. Regular code reviews and static analysis fortify applications. Integrating security throughout the software development lifecycle is crucial. Automated security testing in CI/CD pipelines detects vulnerabilities early. Cloud-native application protection platforms offer enhanced capabilities for safeguarding applications. Fostering a culture of security awareness among development teams is essential. Collaboration between security and development teams ensures seamless integration of security considerations.
By adopting these strategies, organizations can significantly enhance the security of their cloud-based applications, ensuring they remain resilient against evolving threats.
