Cyber Security Services: Cloud Security, Vulnerability Manangement

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Cloud Security & Design

Security by Design (sbD) is a security assurance approach that formalizes your cloud Identity design, automates security controls and auditing. This approach towards security ensures compliance at scale across multiple industries including healthcare, finance, pharmaceutical, and other highly regulated verticals regardless of what cloud you have investments on.

SbD is our approach when helping you design your cloud security strategy; It calls for ensuring compliance in all phases including the planning in the following areas:

Identity Management (including trust relationships)
Logging & monitoring across all cloud services
Encryption across your cloud
Golden Image hardening and compliance
App code security tests within your CI/CD pipeline
CI/CD Pipeline security
Docker Image vulnerability scanning

How Security by Design Works

First and foremost; SbD calls for the automation of security baselines including Security as Code (SaC), Audit Controls, Operating Systems, Services and apps running in your cloud. This aligns with the DevSecOps practice which aims to automate and describe your infrastructure with code

We take a phased approach when we implement Security by Design.

Phase 1

We document your specific security requirements, which include policies, roles, groups etc. We then document the controls you operate in your cloud and decide what security rules you may need to enforce.

Phase 2

Define the cloud configuration you require, which may include the following:

Configuration scripts across various cloud-native services
Configuration scripts for Policies, Roles, and permissions for the different environments you may have such as test, staging, and production
Configuration scripts for images “golden images” which allow you to only deploy and use hardened images, and easily update them at will to any cloud
Configuration scripts for logging across cloud services

We use open source tried-n-true standard tools such as Terraform and Ansible to provide you with a modern way to version, deploy and manage your cloud, even when you have a multi-cloud strategy, which based on our years of experience; many large enterprise clients do.

Phase 3

Define Templates for your cloud infrastructure (IaC). Every major cloud has its own templating method, however, we believe you must stay cloud agnostic and therefore use open source tools like Terraform to define your infrastructure and manage it at scale.Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) ensures compliance, repeatability, and fast provisioning to any cloud. It also ensures that your team follows a standard and best practices when provisioning new resources in the cloud. Templates help all of your team stay in compliance given the previous security controls designed around your infrastructure where these templates are used.

Phase 4

Validation. In this phase, we validate all of your configurations to ensure it has no loopholes and operates as expected. Security by Design ensures you achieve success in the following key areas:

Enforcing compliance across clouds
Establishing operational excellence from the beginning in your cloud journey
Establishing powerful governance and automation

The end result is a fully automated environment(s) that does not have security as an afterthought but rather baked in from the initial design blueprint.

How can we help you? Reach out to us at sales@cybersecurityprivacy.com or get a quote.

Compliance in your Cloud

Regulatory compliance is when a company obeys the laws, regulations, guidelines and specifications that pertain to its business. Here are a few practical examples from TechTarget:

Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002: SOX was enacted in response to the high-profile Enron and WorldCom financial scandals. It’s meant to protect shareholders and the general public from accounting errors and fraudulent practices in the enterprise. Among other provisions, the law sets rules on storing and retaining business records in IT systems.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA): HIPAA Title II includes an administrative simplification section that mandates standardization of electronic health records systems and includes security mechanisms designed to protect data privacy and patient confidentiality.
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS): PCI DSS is a set of policies and procedures created in 2004 by Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express to ensure the security of credit, debit, and cash card transactions.
Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA): Signed into law in 2002, FISMA requires federal agencies to conduct annual reviews of information security programs in order to keep risks to data at or below specified acceptable levels.

In a global economy, it is also necessary to be aware of the laws that are enforced not just pertaining to your industry but also in the countries where your customers live.

Cloud Security Automation

To increase security in your cloud, you must follow automated cloud security and compliance procedures. In fact, cloud computing lends itself very well to many features of automation. Here are a few ways that automating the security controls and processes for your cloud server enhances your security.

Continuous monitoring: Automated security programs run checks automatically against certain threat parameters, including user privilege, permission changes to files, and monitoring against known security threats.
Evaluation: Certain compliance automation programs will not only search for threats but analyze findings and sort by perceived or predicted severity for a team member to review.
Correction: Any suspicious activity can be automatically run up the ladder to the appropriate person or the program can be coded to take certain next steps of action. Businesses can customize what steps should automatically be taken against certain threats, allowing for human intervention when appropriate.

Benefits of Cloud Security Automation

Reduced time spent on security operations: Automated responses are often happening in the background, running faster than IT professionals could run manual processes, and work time spent on security is reduced by having personnel involved only at certain points.