The Need for Workload Visibility
Cloud computing provides significant benefits to an organization in terms of availability, scalability, and flexibility. As a result, companies are increasingly moving critical infrastructure to cloud workloads, including virtual machines (VMs), serverless computing, and containerized applications.
With the growth of the cloud comes a growing need for cloud security. Cloud workloads face unique threats and require security that is tailored to their needs. A company cannot secure cloud workloads that they do not know exist against unknown threats. With the growth of cloud workloads, a cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) offering in-depth visibility is essential to protecting an organization’s applications and services against cyber threats.
Main Features of Agentless Workload Posture (AWP)
AWP is designed to address many of the leading security threats faced by cloud workloads. Some of the key features that an AWP solution must provide include the following:
- Flexible, Agentless Protection: Cloud workloads are designed to provide flexible access to computing resources. Workload protection should be agentless to ensure that resources are protected from the moment that they are spun up and that the agent does not consume valuable resources.
- Centralized Visibility and Management: An AWP solution must allow the security team to monitor and manage workload security from a single, integrated solution. Otherwise, fragmented visibility across large, multi-cloud security deployments will lead to blind spots and delayed responses to cyber threats.
- Vulnerability Management: Applications deployed in cloud workloads face many of the same vulnerabilities as in other deployment environments. However, VMs, containers, and serverless platforms can also introduce new security risks. An AWP should offer continuous vulnerability scanning to enable an organization to effectively manage software vulnerabilities at scale.
- Leaked Secrets: Applications running in cloud workloads may require access to authentication credentials, API keys, and other sensitive information. An AWP should monitor for leaked credentials to enable an organization to mitigate the potential damage caused by a compromised account.
Benefits
Effectively protecting cloud workloads against cyber threats is difficult, especially as security teams struggle to maintain vital visibility into rapidly-expanding cloud workloads. AWP helps security teams to solve this problem and provides significant benefits for cloud workload security, including the following:
- Deep Workload Visibility: AWP provides in-depth visibility into an organization’s cloud workloads, including VMs, serverless, and containers. This enables security professionals to remediate configuration errors, malware infections, and other threats to their cloud-based applications and resources.
- Improved Security: AWP helps security teams to identify and remediate common cloud workload security risks, such as misconfigurations, malware infections, and vulnerabilities. This helps to improve the security of an organization’s cloud-based and on-prem infrastructure against cyber threats.
- No Performance Impacts: Deploying agents to cloud workloads to provide visibility and protection consumes resources and can degrade the performance of these workloads. Using an agentless solution provides the protection that cloud workloads need without the performance impacts.
- Scalable Security: As corporate cloud deployments grow, security teams can struggle to effectively protect expanding cloud workloads. An AWP helps security teams to scale by centralizing visibility into cloud workloads and automating workload scanning and identification of security risks.
AWP in the CloudGuard CNAPP Solution
Cloud-native applications require a range of security controls tailored to the risks that they face. Agentless workload posture is a critical part of a cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP), providing security teams with scalable threat visibility for cloud workloads without degrading the performance of these cloud-based resources.
When designing security for cloud infrastructure, a clear understanding of cloud security risks and how to mitigate them is critical to success. To learn more about the available cloud security solutions and how to select the correct ones for your organization’s cloud deployment, check out this buyer’s guide to cloud security.
Check Point offers a range of cloud security solutions, including security solutions for cloud-based workloads. Check Point CloudGuard includes CNAPP functionality that incorporates AWP to improve threat prevention, detection, and remediation in the cloud. Learn more about how Check Point can improve your organization’s protection of cloud-native applications with Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP
Feedback