Cloud Cybersecurity Strategy Must Consider Identity Management

In today's digital age, cloud security has become a top priority for organizations looking to protect their data and operations. As more businesses migrate to hybrid and multicloud environments, the complexity of managing security also increases. Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) have emerged as a comprehensive solution, combining various security tools into unified platforms.

This approach not only improves visibility and control over cloud workloads, but also addresses growing cyber threats by focusing on advanced identity and access management. In this context, adopting CNAPP and strengthening identity-based security policies become essential to address security challenges in a constantly evolving digital environment.

According to Tenable’s 2024 Cloud Security Outlook global report, the top risks for cloud infrastructure are insecure identities and misconfigurations. Security risks for cloud infrastructure include insecure human/service identities and permissions, as well as cloud misconfigurations for 39% of surveyed professionals. Among the biggest challenges in protecting identities and permissions are the lack of visibility, cited by 53% of respondents, and the difficulty of managing rights in a multicloud environment, reported by 50% of professionals.

A key challenge in cloud security is managing identities (resource-associated privileges) and permissions across multiple environments to avoid oversights. Granting too many privileges gives people excessive control over the cloud and its resources. Identity and access management is fundamental for an effective cybersecurity strategy. As companies progress in their digitalization journey, improving cloud management and visibility is crucial.

To comply with various regulations and ensure data security, organizations must establish clear policies for privileged accounts. This includes processes for creating and deleting accounts, changing default passwords, monitoring access by location and time, and auditing usage, among other security and control requirements.

Identity control security often appears more confusing in hybrid cloud environments, where decentralization and tool diversity require a proper control configuration. Guaranteeing secure access and maintaining different forms of multifactor authentication is important for this. Identity and access management is a challenge, as data can be accessible from data centers and cloud environments, so data must be encrypted to ensure that only authorized users and applications can use it. In this context, implementing the Zero Trust security model, which verifies, authenticates, and analyzes each access request to resources, whether internal or external, is necessary.

This growing trend in cybersecurity has generated the need for specialized cloud cybersecurity providers to boost cloud identity and rights management (CIEM) capabilities in their offerings, which is why we recently saw the rise of CNAPP platforms (all-in-one platforms that unify security and compliance capabilities to prevent, detect, and respond to cloud security threats) focused on identity. This new generation of tools offers granular identity and access management, enabling full control of cloud security risk in multicloud environments and across the entire assets and data spectrum.

Initially, CNAPPs emerged intending to simplify the cloud security tooling landscape and move toward a unified set of capabilities for protecting workloads across multiple clouds. However, agent-based cloud protection platforms (CWPP) became overly complex and expensive, failing to adequately protect these workloads.

It is essential to recognize that identity and access management is not limited to employees, since it also extends to contractors, business partners, mobile and remote users, and even customers. Additionally, identities can include Internet of Things (IoT) devices, robots, and code fragments, such as APIs and microservices. This broad scope requires a rigorous management to ensure that all these actors and elements can access in a safe and controlled way.

To guarantee security, monitoring the identity and access management systems must be a collaborative effort. This team should include IT operations, security, risk, compliance, and governance professionals. Only through collaboration among these experts can an effective and secure identity and access management in the organization be guaranteed.

Therefore, behavioral analysis using artificial intelligence integrated into CNAPP solutions can detect malicious logins, such as multiple access attempts in a short period, unknown locations, or unrecognized devices. AI can identify these suspicious signals and trigger a real-time investigation, allowing for a quick and effective response to potential threats.

A valuable recommendation for organizations striving to bolster their cybersecurity measures is to explore the adoption and integration of cloud-native application security platforms (CNAPP) into their existing security frameworks. These solutions consolidate various security tools into a cohesive and unified platform, empowering organizations with advanced identity and access management capabilities. By leveraging CNAPPs, businesses can enhance their cloud workload protection with features such as real-time monitoring, robust access control, and efficient vulnerability identification and mitigation strategies.

To maximize CNAPP effectiveness, organizations should establish clear policies for identity and access management, prioritize identity-based security, and use continuous monitoring capabilities to quickly detect and respond to suspicious activity, in addition to fostering collaboration among IT, security, risk, and compliance teams, which is crucial to ensuring an integrated and effective security strategy.