3 Tips to Increase Hybrid and Multicloud Security

Cloud technology is a powerful tool that facilitates collaboration among distributed workforces and allows businesses to quickly scale their digital workloads. According to a Microsoft survey, 95% of respondents said cloud technology was critical to their organizations' successes, and 86% planned to increase their investments in hybrid cloud and multicloud tech. 

However, cloud technology also comes with increased risks. The lack of visibility and coverage across hybrid and multicloud environments can make it difficult for security teams to identify and resolve risks. Security teams are also being asked to monitor fragmented tools across different clouds, which can make it difficult to create a unified view of their comprehensive security posture. 

Microsoft research from earlier this year found that 86% of surveyed decision-makers believed their current cybersecurity strategies were not sufficient to secure their multicloud environments. So how should organizations adapt their security approach?

Create a Single-Pane-of-Glass View

Cloud technology enables businesses to quickly scale their digital workloads because they are not constrained by managing physical devices or IT infrastructure. However, this agility can also make it difficult for them to keep track of their various workloads, data streams, and applications because they are scattered across a mix of different cloud platforms and on-premises locations. Securing a hybrid or multicloud environment requires organizations to have visibility and cross-platform control in a single-pane-of-glass view. That way they can visualize the security posture of multiple workloads at once, regardless of location.

Use CNAPP For Code-to-Cloud Context

For many organizations, security and compliance used to be distinct silos — making it difficult for development and security teams to protect applications in the cloud. More than half (54%) of enterprises do not integrate security into their DevOps pipelines, according to Microsoft's "Enterprise DevOps Report." Cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) integrate these silos into a single, easy-to-reference platform to help organizations secure and protect cloud-native applications.

Strong security hygiene means being able to monitor and remediate code within the same pane-of-glass view that organizations use to manage their overall cloud security posture. CNAPPs enable increased collaboration and integration between development and security teams while also reducing the possibility of code issues being moved into the cloud. By intaking all infrastructure-as-code scanning signals and combining them with data sensitivity, identity, and runtime intelligence, CNAPPs enable security teams to make recommendations and prioritize risks within the context of the entire hybrid or multicloud network.

Fortify Security Hygiene With Threat Detection and Response

Active threat detection is a critical component of securing the cloud environment against potential cybersecurity breaches. For example, organizations should examine the connections among applications, data stores, and workstreams to anticipate how threat actors could conceivably move through their environments to compromise operations.

When protecting workloads, it's critical that developers, security administrators, and security operations center analysts are all on the same page. It's also important that organizations take a cohesive, collaborative approach to cloud security by ensuring that all of the key players are working together to build security integrations that cover the full scope of your threat landscape. This can look like embedding anti-malware scanning tools into DevOps to ensure a company's code is protected against malware or preventing attackers from entering its network by hardening container security.

— This article was written by Yuri Diogenes, a member of the Microsoft Security Team.