Cloud, automation, and DevOps have led to cloud-based companies speeding up their releases, improving their innovation, and expanding their app scalability. But the speed and unlimited scalability can cause some shortfalls. You will start noticing the real repercussions when you are granted the facility to build without any restrictions.
Whether you are a new SaaS or a mature organization like Reddit, discoverability of the assets is the key to detecting vulnerabilities that prove costly. However, even the large and well-resourced teams of players find it difficult to achieve visibility. The high frequency of changes in the engineering cycle or DevOps pipeline makes it difficult for engineers and security analysts to spot vulnerabilities. This brings us to the question, how can companies sustain in this challenging environment without slowing everyone down?
Leaders in digital technology like Auth0, Reddit, Databricks, and others are adopting a data-driven approach that powers a continuous governance and security solution to manage vulnerabilities efficiently.
Data Should Be The First Priority
Data reliability is critical in all tasks including security reviews, enforcing policies, asset visibility, monitoring changes over time, or remediating gaps in the security framework.
It is impossible to protect what you cannot see and most organizations aren’t really seeing the overall picture of the complex environment of the present.
Just take the example of misconfigured public S3 buckets continuing to deceive many people. The problem seems like an easy fix but if you lack the right tool to consistently provide up-to-date data, it would be difficult for you to discover the depth of the problem and its root causes.
Companies like Auth0 and Reddit identify the activities like routinely collecting and consolidating their disparate infrastructure data as core parts of their vulnerability management process. Automation of resource recovery ensures the reliable identification of infrastructure-vulnerable packages.
Automate Context And Not Action Alone
The context of a task, its vulnerability, and risk significantly influence the way your team decides priorities. You are in fact inviting disasters by treating alerts and notifications from multiple security tools equally. The most effective among the security teams give the required weightage to assessing context to address the most critical needs-context derived from living in your environment.
Your organization, treated as a combination of infrastructure, policies, tools, and team members are unique. Out of the box automation is seen as a compelling option by security teams who are finding it hard to keep up with the attack of vulnerabilities. However, this type of automation often fails in addressing the root cause of the issues.
Automating context through relationship mapping of resources and their owners is a much better way to bring up the accountability rate. This is a better way when compared to auto-remediating issues that lead to poor security and development hygiene. Mapping of the relationships between resources and their owners enable the cloud security teams to automate accountability.
Managing Vulnerability And Risk
With the data in place, the security teams at Reddit can deploy a seamless vulnerability management program and assess the things that have and haven’t been scanned for their infrastructure and the person responsible for remediation. An example would be the maintainer of a repo code or the technical owner of a server instance.
These companies can make use of data and query to know the number of services and products in their organization and report on the percentage of servers in production scanned on a daily basis. They can also identify a resource quickly and gather all of its attributes and contextual relationships within a few seconds in order to generate a response to an active threat.
Ensure That You Avoid Noise By All Means
Never lose your focus on your key goals; preventing security incidents and spotting and remediating accidents when they occur. It is important to prioritize simplicity and visibility of the security operations. This is especially true when it comes to tooling.
Noise is undesired even if it is sourced from the tools designed to make your job easier. The operations slow down due to noise in data and reporting. Noise also has a negative impact on your urgency and response to alerts making you vulnerable.
Simple And Reliable Security Operations
By centralizing data collection, DevOps and security tooling, consolidation, and aggregation from their infrastructure, companies like Reddit, Databricks, and Auth0 can rely on this data-driven foundation to perform their overall security operations. They have developed insights into all the resources that exist in their environment and visibility into the owners that are in charge of remediation. They can do even the hardest tasks and make decisions confidently.
