#cloud visibility

Cloud Security Management is a strategic discipline encompassing the policies and technologies required to protect data and applications across public and hybrid cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP). It is essential for managing digital risk under the shared responsibility model, where the customer is responsible for security configurations and data. The critical organizational pain point addressed is the high cost and financial penalties due to misconfigurations in cloud environments that lead to breaches. Simple configuration errors, such as publicly accessible storage or excessive permissions, are the leading causes of cloud breaches, resulting in massive remediation costs, regulatory fines (GDPR, HIPAA), and reputational damage.

Effective Cloud Security Management relies on three pillars:

1. Unified Cloud Visibility and Posture Control, which uses Cloud Security Management (CSM) tools for continuous discovery, automated policy enforcement against benchmarks (like CIS), and instant remediation of configuration drift

2. Identity and Access Management (IAM) Standardization, ensuring the rigorous enforcement of the least privilege principle and strong authentication

3. Data Protection and Compliance Integration, mandating data encryption and deploying Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies.

This proactive, automated approach drives a measurable Return on Security Investment (ROSI). It optimizes the cybersecurity budget by reducing the need for manual checks, allowing security personnel to focus on high-value architectural design and digital transformation. By building security via Policy-as-Code ("Shift Left"), Cloud Security Management transforms security from a potential bottleneck into an enabler of agility and innovation, ensuring secure, cost-effective cloud adoption with robust governance frameworks.

The Orca Cloud Visibility Platform utilizes its unique SideScanning technology to deliver comprehensive full-stack visibility into your cloud infrastructure. With Orca Security, your IT security teams harness “Security at the Speed of the Cloud.”

Database breaches in the public cloud are getting reported at an alarming frequency. Earlier this year, we read about a database breach that exposed over 275 Million user records. We will cover the common causes and the best practice checks that organizations should follow to ensure database security in the cloud.

Cause

A huge MongoDB database exposing 275,265,298 records of Indian citizens containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) was left unprotected on the Internet for more than two weeks.

Security Discovery researcher Bob Diachenko discovered this publicly accessible MongoDB database hosted on Amazon AWS using Shodan, and as the historical data provided by the platform showed, this huge cache of PII data was first indexed on April 23, 2019.

Gartner had in its report published in early 2019, recommended that security leaders invest in cloud security and posture management tools to identify and remediate the risks of misconfiguration, mismanagement, and mistakes. Enterprises have since then started focusing on cloud security and are on the look-out for a dynamic cloud security solution but are still unaware of what tool to look for in a tool.

Within the cloud security space, there are Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPPs), and Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools. While these tools offer an over-lapping set of capabilities to each other, they do not provide all the capabilities required to perform the job of the other.

2020 Cloud Security Forecast 2019 was the year of leaky buckets and misconfigurations. Several large organizations were in the news in 2019 on account of leaky buckets and misconfigurations. While Gartner has predicted that by 2022, the public cloud services market will hit $331.2 Billion, it has also predicted that 95% of the cloud security breaches will be an organization’s fault. It is unfortunate that the pace of cloud adoption is not proportional to the pace of implementation of cloud security measures.