“Cloud Native Security should be considered at the top, especially for the organizations that develop new products”
In the digitization world, businesses have adopted the practices of DevOps and are searching for solutions to programming security via coding at the time of development procedure. This will reduce retroactively identifying the code at the testing time or when a new product is at its production state. In parallel, software developers are more and more taking responsibility for Kubernetes clusters security because shift-left strategies are being executed across the product delivery model. Cloud-Native Security should be first on the priority list for any of the production systems. A cluster of distributed platforms demands high concentration towards security. Workload protection, which might be distributed across several systems, cloud vendors, and networks needs a different plan to secure the distributed services that are compatible with today’s workload. Next comes the best measures that will help your company to consolidate security into your software engineering DNS for producing a security-conscious program for cloud native apps.
Cloud Native Security Challenges – Some Common Ones
Before we jump directly on the preventive measure, first it is important to learn about the challenges that users face at the time of securing online apps. Microservices and containers have produced an incredible speed and flexibility to DevOps but, the advantages come with security challenges as well. Some of the common challenges associated with cloud-native protection are as followed:
- Absence of Off-premises Security – Software-based scaling states cloud-native apps can be expanded beyond the expected limitations that are in the DevOps control. This makes it impossible to spread traditional security gadgets like firewalls to create an effective boundary around the cloud-native application that is porous by nature.
- Risks Diagnosing Security Issues – The cloud-native application’s elastic nature and increasing complexity is making it tougher to address the actual reason behind security anomaly or incidents and give quick response.
- Elastic Surface of Threat – Cloud-native apps have complicated the things between a quickly changing amount of functions, VMs, containers, and service-mesh, and might span several cloud vendors. While this enables them to scale from a few work operations to 1000 in seconds. Here, the unexpected consequence is an elastic threat surface, which develops and shrinks with the programs, making such platforms complicated while security.
- Security DevOps Velocity – When a release cycle and pipeline are measured in terms of minutes, manual provisioning and security policies management is no more feasible. Cloud-Native Security cannot be the only responsibility of the dedicated security team, which means the developers also have to show their equal dedication to giving the best security results.
Best Cloud Native Security Measures
With an increase in complexity and security exposure of cloud-native workloads, few security configurations and tests must shift towards the left and use previous steps in the development pipeline. Software developers must take on the core responsibility of delivering the security code. Following are some best practices to secure cloud-native applications:
- Begin from the Starting Point – ‘Start early’ phase in the development procedure by enforcing security at the container and microservices stage. If the container of applications is not developed with protection aspects in mind, the complete cluster would be at high risk. Containers are best protected during the development where security can be programmed into the coding part directly. For example – by permitting DevOps to define the network standards that will be used at the coding time, Cloud Native Security can be enforced as part of the fundamental application structure.
- Try to Automate Majority Things – Automation technology is really about checking and managing the assets to fulfill business goals. Rapid review on successful or failed automated tests speeds up the automation procedure. Enterprises should seek more automated methods to secure cloud-native applications. If the development team is ruled by security compliance, the higher is the automation percentage, the simpler the security audit.
- Recheck All Security Measures – With the passing of each day and increase in workload, changes in the existing security levels are possible. Cyber security is not at all a one-time event. Rechecking of security standards should be attempted every week to check that no vulnerabilities have been originated because of application evolution and developers iterate. Therefore, it is must make a repetitive cycle in the software itself so that the app itself realizes the changes and information about the same responsible authority.
Begin Left & Small With Security
Protecting vulnerabilities against attackers to be safe from threats like privileges elevation and shellcode injection inside the app can be achieved with strong Cloud-Native Security solutions. These approaches need to be implemented at the microservices and container level. Start with the smallest elements to develop protected containers, and their security features will explore into the cluster.