Cloud Risk Management

While the cloud offers greater flexibility, scalability, and resiliency than a traditional, on-prem data center, it also comes with potential risks, including a range of security risks. Misunderstandings regarding the cloud shared responsibility model and vendor-provided security controls can create security gaps that may be exploited by an attacker. The various levels of the cloud infrastructure stack each have their own security risks and challenges, such as the unique security risks and attack vectors for containerized and serverless applications.

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The Need for Cloud Risk Management

Making the move to the cloud introduces a range of new security risks, and these risks increase alongside an organization’s reliance on cloud infrastructure. Most companies have multi-cloud deployments, which introduce additional complexity and various vendor-specific configurations and security risks.

As cloud security risks become more numerous and complex, the only way to effectively secure the cloud is via a mature cloud risk management program. Security teams must properly prioritize cloud security risks to ensure that the most significant risks to the enterprise are addressed first, offering the greatest return on investment.

How Does It Work?

A cloud risk management program relies heavily on visibility, context, and risk prioritization. First, an organization needs to know a risk exists, then it needs context to determine which risks should be addressed first and how they can be managed.

To implement cloud risk management at scale — especially across multiple cloud platforms — automation is essential. A cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) can provide deep visibility into risks at each layer of the cloud infrastructure stack. CNAPPs incorporate various cloud security functions, including:

Cloud security posture management (CSPM)
Containerized and serverless workload protection
Web application and API security
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM)
Cloud detection and response (CDR)
Developer security

By integrating all of these capabilities into a single solution, CNAPP provides wide visibility and valuable context regarding an organization’s cloud risk exposure. Based on this information, security teams can appropriately prioritize and manage risks to corporate cloud environments.

How to Calculate the Potential Risk

In the cloud and elsewhere, risk is calculated based on the combination of potential impact and likelihood of occurrence. This combination addresses both of the factors that might make one risk more of a potential threat than another.

In the cloud, a risk may have various impacts, ranging from data breaches to affecting the availability of cloud-hosted applications and services. Risks should be scored based on their potential impacts on the organization. For example, a breach of admin credentials should be evaluated based on the permissions assigned to those credentials and how they could be abused to harm the organization. Alternatively, the score for a vulnerability in a cloud-based application should incorporate a measure of the importance of that system to core business operations.

The other side of a risk score is the likelihood that a risk will materialize or a vulnerability will be exploited. For example, a vulnerability that requires legitimate credentials to exploit likely poses a lower risk than one that can be exploited by any unauthenticated user.

Risk Management Best Practices

Managing risk in the cloud can be a challenging task. Some best practices to improve the effectiveness of a cloud risk management program include:

Automate Risk Identification: Cloud risk can be introduced by a wide range of potential factors, and cloud environments are too expansive and heterogeneous to be manually monitored effectively. Automated identification enables an organization to quickly respond to potential cloud security risks before they can be exploited by an attacker.
Collect Context: Contextual information is essential to differentiate between a major security risk and a non-event. Ideally, cloud risk identification tools will collect and present contextual information in a way that enables security personnel to rapidly and effectively evaluate a potential risk.
Prioritize Risks: The sheer volume of potential cloud security risks can easily overwhelm a corporate security team. Identified risks should be prioritized based on their potential impacts and likelihood of occurrence, enabling security teams to rapidly manage the biggest threats.
Consolidate Security Infrastructure: Managing risk via an array of security solutions specific to each cloud environment or potential threat vector decreases efficiency and can create visibility gaps. Ideally, cloud risk management will be performed via a single solution that provides complete visibility across an organization’s entire cloud infrastructure.
Remediate at Scale: Companies face a range of cloud security risks and may have multiple instances of a particular risk across their cloud infrastructure. Effective cloud risk management includes the ability to efficiently remediate risks at scale, ideally by taking advantage of automation to fix common errors or implement remediation actions across an organization’s entire cloud environment.