Cloud Infrastructure Security Goal
The main goal of cloud infrastructure security is to protect this virtual infrastructure against a wide range of potential security threats, including both internal and external threats. By implementing policies, tools, and technologies for identifying and managing security issues, companies reduce the cost to the business, improve business continuity, and enhance regulatory compliance efforts.
Importance of Cloud Infrastructure Security
Companies are increasingly moving to the cloud, entrusting these environments with sensitive data and business-critical applications. As a result, cloud security is a growing component of their cybersecurity programs, and cloud infrastructure security is a crucial part of this.
Cloud infrastructure security processes and solutions provide companies with much-needed protection against threats to their cloud infrastructure. These solutions can help to prevent data breaches (ensuring that sensitive data remains private by blocking unauthorized access), protect the reliability and availability of cloud services, and support regulatory compliance in the cloud.
How Does It Work?
The responsibility for cloud infrastructure security is dependent on the customer’s cloud strategy. For example, in public cloud, security is shared between the cloud provider and customer under the cloud shared responsibility model. Here the public cloud service provider is responsible for the security of the physical infrastructure in their data centers.
Responsibility for virtual infrastructure can be split between the public cloud customer and provider based on the cloud service model in use. For example, the cloud provider is responsible for securing the services that they provide to a cloud customer, such as the hypervisors used to host virtual machines in an IaaS environment. In a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment, the cloud provider is fully responsible for the security of the infrastructure stack.
However, in all cases, the public cloud customer is responsible for properly configuring the security settings provided by the cloud provider. They are also responsible for securing everything above the handover point in the cloud infrastructure stack. For example, a cloud customer should deploy virtual firewalls and similar network security solutions to secure traffic in an IaaS deployment.
Types of Cloud Infrastructure Security
Cloud environments come in various forms, and the details of cloud infrastructure security depend on the cloud model in use. The three main types of cloud infrastructure security include:
- Public Cloud Infrastructure Security: According to the public cloud shared responsibility model, the physical infrastructure in public cloud environments is managed and protected by the cloud provider who owns it, while the virtual infrastructure is split between the cloud vendor and the customer..
- Private Cloud Infrastructure Security: Private clouds are deployed within an organization’s data centers, making the organization responsible for ensuring private cloud security, including the security of the underlying infrastructure.
- Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Security: Hybrid clouds mix public and private cloud environments. This means that responsibility for the underlying infrastructure is shared between the cloud provider (in the case of public cloud) and the cloud customer.
Benefits of Cloud Infrastructure Security
A mature cloud infrastructure security program can provide various benefits to the cloud customer, including:
- Improved Security: Cloud infrastructure security provides additional visibility and protection for the underlying infrastructure that supports an organization’s cloud services. This enhanced security posture enables more rapid detection, prevention, and remediation of potential threats.
- Greater Reliability and Availability: Cyberattacks and other incidents can cause an organization’s cloud-based applications to go offline or cause other unplanned behavior. Cloud infrastructure security helps to reduce the risk of these incidents for example by blocking attack traffic, improving the availability and reliability of cloud environments.
- Simplified Management: Cloud infrastructure security solutions should be part of an organization’s cloud security architecture. This makes it easier to monitor and manage the security of cloud environments as a whole.
- Regulatory Compliance: There are a wide variety of regulations with which cloud customers need to comply, depending on their business requirements. Many of these regulations define organizations’ access to their computing environments and the sensitive data that they hold. Protecting the underlying infrastructure supporting these environments is essential for regulatory compliance.
- Decreased Operating Costs: Cloud infrastructure security can enable organizations to find and fix potential issues before they become major problems. This reduces the cost of operating cloud-based infrastructure.
- Cloud confidence: Cloud customers who are confident in their security will move more workloads to the cloud, faster. This enables the cloud customer to more rapidly take advantage of the benefits of the cloud.
Cloud Infrastructure Security Best Practices
Cloud infrastructure security is vital to the protection of corporate cloud environments and the resources that they contain. Some security best practices for the cloud include:
- Implement security for both the control and data plane in cloud environments.
- Perform regular patching and updates to protect applications and the OS against potential exploits.
- Implement strong access controls leveraging multi-factor authentication and the principle of least privilege.
- Educate employees on the importance of cloud security and best practices for operating in the cloud.
- Encrypt data at rest and in transit across all of the organization’s IT environment.
- Perform regular monitoring and vulnerability scanning to identify current threats and potential security risks.
Cloud Infrastructure Security with Check Point
A strong cloud infrastructure security and cloud security program begins with the right security architecture. Learn more about designing a secure cloud environment with Check Point’s Cloud Security Blueprint.
Based on this blueprint, your organization can start identifying and selecting the tools that it needs to secure its cloud infrastructure. For more information on protecting cloud network infrastructure, check out this buyer’s guide.
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security enables companies to effectively protect the data plane in the cloud by securing network infrastructure against potential cyber threats. To learn more about the capabilities that Check Point CloudGuard offers to secure your organization’s cloud environment, sign up for a free demo today.
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