Understanding cloud visibility
Cloud visibility quantifies how comprehensively an enterprise can track its cloud computing infrastructure, assets, resources, and expenditure. Visibility across public and private clouds, and any IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and serverless applications an enterprise leverages are key to developing a holistic picture of cloud activity.
The cloud has its fair share of unique risks, many of which can cause catastrophic damage. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach 2023 report, 82% of data breaches in 2023 involved cloud-based data, and the average cost of a data breach was $4.45 million. These statistics matter more than ever: Most enterprises’ mission-critical infrastructures are now cloud-based. According to Google Cloud, 41.4% of decision-makers are increasing the commissioning of cloud solutions, and 33.4% want to replace legacy software with cloud-based tools.
As cloud adoption grows, the only way to mitigate risks and access the full spectrum of cloud capabilities is to prioritize visibility. Read on to learn more about cloud visibility—and how to achieve it.
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What challenges prevent complete cloud visibility?
| Challenge | Description |
|---|---|
| Single-click cloud growth | A single mouse click can instantly and significantly expand an enterprise’s cloud environment, introducing new complexities and vulnerabilities. Because it’s hassle-free, single-click cloud expansion can be a blessing for agile teams, but it can result in the uncontrolled proliferation of cloud assets and stand in the way of complete visibility. |
| Rapid deployment | To compete in current markets, businesses give their developers free rein to design and deploy applications rapidly. However, from a cloud visibility standpoint, DevOps environments are rife with challenges. The biggest challenge is balancing ways to streamline CI/CD pipelines and the empowerment of developers while maintaining complete visibility and cloud security. |
| No meaningful cloud context | One of the most overlooked aspects of cloud visibility involves understanding relationships among cloud assets. Without understanding the contexts of cloud assets, businesses can only achieve partial visibility: Businesses may have a view of a cloud asset, but they won’t be able to derive any security-related meaning from it. |
| Security tool sprawl | Security tool sprawl, which describes the proliferation of disparate and disjointed security tools, is the enemy of comprehensive visibility. If businesses don’t have a unified view of their cloud estate from a single platform, cloud visibility inevitably suffers. Blind spots in a business’s cloud environments allow misconfigurations and vulnerabilities to fester, and this can escalate to data breaches and cyberattacks. |
| Multi-cloud complexities | Many enterprises commission a diverse assortment of public cloud solutions from cloud providers like AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, Alibaba, and VMware. Although multi-cloud strategies can enhance IT ecosystems, they present security teams with a labyrinth of disparate workloads, data, applications, and users, which can often make comprehensive visibility an impossible task. |
Why CNAPP is the must-have tool for cloud visibility
A Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) is the best tool for cloud visibility because it integrates multiple critical security technologies into a single, unified solution. This comprehensive approach provides unparalleled visibility across the entire cloud environment. Here's why CNAPP excels at providing cloud visibility:
Integrates traditionally siloed technologies: CNAPP combines several key cloud security technologies to eliminate blind spots and provide a holistic view of your cloud environment, including:
Full lifecycle protection: CNAPP offers visibility and security across the entire application lifecycle, from development to runtime. This includes scanning during the CI/CD pipeline and continuous monitoring in production environments.
Graph-based context: The platform offers a graph-based view of risks and relationships between resources. This intuitive representation makes it easier for team members at any skill level to understand the context around risks and respond to issues faster.
Multi-cloud support: CNAPP provides consistent visibility and security across multiple cloud providers, giving you a unified view of your entire cloud estate.
Automated risk assessments: By correlating data from various sources, CNAPP can automatically identify and prioritize risks, helping teams focus on the most critical issues.
By 2029, 60% of enterprises that do not deploy a unified CNAPP solution within their cloud architecture will lack extensive visibility into the cloud attack surface and consequently fail to achieve their desired zero-trust goals.
Gartner CNAPP Market Guide
Compliance management: CNAPP continuously monitors for compliance with various regulatory standards and industry benchmarks, providing visibility into your compliance posture.
Identity and access management: The CIEM component of CNAPP offers visibility into permissions and entitlements across your cloud environment, helping prevent privilege escalation and unauthorized access.
Threat detection and response: CNAPP integrates threat intelligence and provides real-time monitoring for potential security incidents, offering visibility into active threats.
2024 Gartner® Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
In this report, Gartner offers insights and recommendations to analyze and evaluate emerging CNAPP offerings.
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Best practices to ensure complete cloud visibility
Following these best practices to achieve comprehensive visibility across cloud environments and reduce your attack surface:
Establish a Comprehensive Inventory:
Conduct regular cloud asset discovery to identify all resources, including compute, storage, network, and database instances.
Utilize cloud provider inventory tools and integrate them with your asset management platform.
Categorize assets based on criticality, sensitivity, and ownership to prioritize risk management.
Implement automated discovery tools that continuously update your asset inventory in real-time.
Use tagging strategies to improve asset organization and management.
Implement a Robust Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP):
Consolidate multiple security functions into a single platform for comprehensive visibility and protection.
Leverage capabilities like CSPM, vulnerability management, and threat detection to identify and mitigate risks.
Prioritize remediation of high-risk vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
Set up automated workflows for incident response and remediation.
Integrate CNAPP with your CI/CD pipeline for shift-left security.
Enhance Network Visibility:
Map your cloud network topology, including virtual networks, subnets, and security groups.
Implement network flow monitoring to analyze traffic patterns and identify anomalies.
Utilize intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) to detect and prevent network attacks.
Implement microsegmentation to isolate workloads and reduce the attack surface.
Use cloud-native firewalls and web application firewalls (WAFs) for granular traffic control.
Strengthen Identity and Access Management (IAM):
Enforce strong password policies and multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Implement role-based access control (RBAC) to grant least privilege access.
Regularly review and audit user access permissions.
Implement just-in-time (JIT) access for privileged accounts.
Use identity governance and administration (IGA) tools for automated access reviews.
Leverage Cloud Native Security Tools:
Utilize cloud provider security services like security groups, network security groups, and key management services.
Implement container security solutions to protect containerized applications.
Employ serverless security measures to safeguard function-as-a-service workloads.
Implement cloud workload protection platforms (CWPP) for runtime protection.
Utilize cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools for continuous compliance monitoring.
Centralized Logging and Monitoring:
Collect logs from various cloud resources and applications into a centralized repository.
Utilize security information and event management (SIEM) solutions for log correlation and analysis.
Implement real-time monitoring and alerting for critical events.
Implement user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) for anomaly detection.
Set up automated alerting and incident response playbooks.
Conduct Regular Security Assessments:
Perform vulnerability scanning and penetration testing to identify weaknesses.
Conduct threat modeling to assess potential attack vectors and impacts.
Conduct regular security audits to evaluate compliance and identify gaps.
Perform cloud configuration reviews using benchmarks like CIS.
Conduct data flow mapping to understand how sensitive information moves through your cloud environment.
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Establish a Cloud Governance Framework:
Define and enforce cloud usage policies across the organization.
Implement automated policy enforcement using cloud management platforms.
Regularly review and update cloud governance policies based on changing business needs and threat landscape.
How Wiz offers unmatched cloud visibility
To prevent catastrophes—think data breaches and regulatory compliance failures—and to achieve comprehensive cloud visibility, businesses need a powerful platform. Enter Wiz.
When it comes to achieving comprehensive cloud visibility, Wiz is the ideal solution. With Wiz, you can protect your cloud environments all the way from build to runtime. Irrespective of cloud usage or architecture, Wiz's cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) includes comprehensive and unparalleled risk assessment across misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, sensitive data, secrets, identities, and more.
Wiz helps you go beyond cataloging what exists in your cloud environments. Instead, it will help you understand the deep relationships and contexts of your cloud assets, which is the kind of cloud visibility that every modern enterprise urgently requires.
The more complex your cloud environments get, the more comprehensive, connected, and easy-to-use your cloud security solution needs to be. Businesses simply can’t protect labyrinthine cloud environments with disjointed tools and platforms. Suboptimal cloud visibility tools are a cloud security vulnerability in itself. The bottom line? Wiz helps you gain a deep understanding of the cloud resources and applications you steward, develop, and deploy.
Get a demo now to see how Wiz can enhance visibility across your cloud environments.
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