What Is Cloud Vulnerability Management (CVM)?

Cloud vulnerability management (CVM) refers to the process of identifying, classifying, and mitigating security weaknesses in cloud environments. CVM helps organizations operating in the cloud to protect sensitive data, maintain compliance, and minimize risks.

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How Cloud Vulnerability Management Works

CVM systems use a phased approach to assess, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities:

Discovery: Using automated scanning and analysis tools against various data sources, APIs, third-party services, and user-generated content, the CVM system discovers potential vulnerabilities.
Prioritization: The system assigns each vulnerability a risk score based on factors like severity, impact, and resources affected.
Assessment: Next, the prioritized vulnerabilities are evaluated and recommendations are made for remediation, including configuration changes, updates or patches to software, disabling unnecessary services, or implementing security controls.
Remediation: The system may automatically execute recommended actions to address each vulnerability, ensuring the process is swiftly completed.
Monitoring: CVM systems are designed to continuously monitor the cloud environment for newly-identified vulnerabilities, automatically repeating the detection-remediation cycle.

Common Cloud Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities in the cloud originate from many sources, including:

Cloud Security Risks: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platforms, providing access to virtualized computing resources, expose users to risks like unpatched operating systems or misconfigured security groups. Platform as a service (PaaS) environments, which offer pre-built managed services, still present risks in the form of weak authentication controls, insufficient access permissions, or insecure integrations.
Misconfigurations: Failure to modify default security settings can inadvertently reveal sensitive data. Storage resources exposed to the internet without proper authentication or encryption in place can result in data leakage, while overly permissive user access rights or group membership can result in unauthorized access and data compromise.
Insecure APIs & Third-Party Services: APIs with weak authentication, inadequate rate limiting, or which lack encryption can enable unauthorized access to resources. Integration of third-party services increases the attack surface and exposes the cloud environment to vulnerabilities in these dependencies.

Proactively addressing these cloud vulnerabilities requires an approach using continuous monitoring, regular audits, and automated remediation.

Tools and Techniques for Cloud Vulnerability Management

To effectively manage vulnerabilities in cloud environments, you should leverage a variety of specialized tools designed to streamline the process. The use of these tools enables you to develop robust cloud vulnerability management strategies adapted to your unique threat profile.

Popular CVM Tools

Various third-party services offer standalone CVM software for use in evaluating security posture:

Nessus: Offered by Tenable, Nessus is a widely-used vulnerability scanner for cloud providers, offering continuous monitoring, compliance checking, and remediation workflows.
Qualys: Qualys provides a cloud vulnerability scanner platform with asset discovery, vulnerability assessment, web application security, and compliance management capabilities.
Cisco Vulnerability Management: Focused on prioritizing vulnerabilities based on risk, Cisco’s offering features risk-based scoring, vulnerability intelligence, and remediation tracking.

Cloud-Specific Vulnerability Scanners

CVM capabilities are available as part of the service offerings of several cloud providers:

AWS Inspector: AWS Inspector automates asset discovery and vulnerability assessments across EC2 instances and AMIs, with integration options for other services. It provides detailed reports on its findings for analysis.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud: This service offers continuous monitoring and vulnerability assessment for Azure resources, and includes automated remediation, threat detection, and integration with other Microsoft security products.
Google Cloud Security Scanner: This Google Cloud service performs regular scans of computer instances to assess their security posture against known vulnerabilities. It integrates with other Google Cloud services for broad monitoring and alerting coverage.

CVM Tool Integrations

CVM tools typically offer integration with other systems to provide better security coverage and improve overall defensive stance:

Gestion des informations et des événements de sécurité (SIEM): Connecting CVM tools to SIEM systems enables centralized log collection, event correlation, and alerting for threats.
L'infrastructure en tant que code (IaC): Integrating CVM systems into IaC tools ensures security is automatically applied in the development lifecycle and in the provisioning of cloud resources.
Configuration Management Databases (CMDB): Integrating CVM into a CMDB helps to maintain accurate asset inventories and improve change tracking across configurations.

Developing a Robust Security Strategy: 5 Effective Tips

To create an effective CVM strategy, organizations must consider a number of factors, such as:

Risk Tolerance: Determine the organization’s risk tolerance and prioritize the allocation of resources by first evaluating the potential threats, vulnerabilities, and impact of a breach.
Compliance Requirements: Ensure the CVM addresses compliance guidelines that apply to the organization, such as the GDPR or HIPAA regulations, or industry standards like CIS Benchmarks or NIST SP 800-53.
Shared Responsibility Model: The shared responsibility model asserts that cloud service providers (CSPs) are responsible for physical infrastructure and updates, while their customers are responsible for correctly and securely configuring services to protect sensitive data.
Clear Responsibilities: Effective collaboration ensures both security and accountability within the organization. Establish clear roles and communication channels between the cloud security team, IT/Operations team, and developers to promote a culture of security.
Vulnerabilities: Take a risk-focused approach to vulnerability management. Leverage threat intelligence feeds, industry reports, and vendor advisories, and evaluate the likelihood of exploitation and potential damage when developing and implementing remediation strategies.

4 Challenges in Cloud Vulnerability Management

Managing vulnerabilities in the cloud prevents several unique challenges:

Scalability Issues: Because cloud resources are often transient, with services scaling up and down based on demand, the attack surface is in a constant state of flux. Traditional vulnerability scanners may struggle to keep pace with the churn of short-lived groups and container instances, for example.
Multi-Cloud and Hybrid IT: Organizations commonly use multiple cloud providers or hybrids of on-premises infrastructure and cloud services. The complexity of these environments often requires substantial effort to maintain security, necessitating the use of multiple vulnerability scanning tools simultaneously.
Shadow IT: Unapproved use of cloud services by internal business units or individual users makes it difficult to manage vulnerabilities. Employees using personal cloud accounts for work-related tasks further reduce visibility and can also introduce security risks.
Skills Gap: Cloud services rapidly evolve, with changes to and new functionality outpacing organizations’ ability to keep up. Consequently, the existing skills shortage within security teams grows more severe. Organizations may find it increasingly difficult to find and retain qualified staff to operate CVM systems.

Organizations can enhance their CVM capabilities and better manage risk by acknowledging these challenges and taking steps to proactively manage them.

Gestion des vulnérabilités avec Check Point

Cloud vulnerability management is a key component of a complete cloud security strategy. CVM systems are used to identify vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in cloud environments, reducing the risk of cyberattacks, data breaches, and compliance violations. Review the Ultimate Cloud Security Guide to gain further insight into securing valuable cloud assets.

Check Point CloudGuard is a world-class, AI-enhanced cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) that safeguards organizations from threats targeting cloud infrastructure by proactively detecting vulnerabilities and automatically remediating them. CloudGuard ensures continued business operations in the face of sophisticated malware, ransomware, and zero-day threats.

To discover how Check Point can protect your organization’s cloud environments from threats ranging from user error to the internet’s most sophisticated attacks, schedule a demo of CloudGuard now.