The growing risks of cybersecurity attacks call for robust cloud data storage and deployment methods. Cloud computing is a widely adopted concept that uses remote servers to provide on-demand access to computing resources, like applications, servers, and data storage. This flexibility of accessing resources from remote locations has significantly increased the adoption of cloud services.
According to the statistics, the cloud applications market is anticipated to grow from $100 billion in 2018 to a whopping $168.6 in 2025. However, the increased cloud deployment has also increased the frequency of cloud security attacks. 45% of data breaches are cloud-based—making cloud security a significant concern for businesses of all types and sizes.
Hence, the need for new and modern security strategies has given birth to Cloud Native Security. It refers to the security measures to protect cloud-based data, applications, and infrastructure.
This blog will dive deeper into understanding Cloud Native Security—what it means, key concepts, best practices, vulnerabilities, and more. So, read along if you want to learn more about this concept!
What Is Cloud Native Security?
Cloud native security means intertwining security into an organization’s overall cloud-native application strategy. Cloud native is the methodology of building and running applications that fully harnesses the power of cloud computing, providing organizations with the ability to run scalable applications in a modern and dynamic environment like public, private and hybrid clouds. This style of security requires changes to the internal infrastructure, including teams and processes to ensure secure applications.
Cloud adoption is becoming the rule rather than the exception, with Gartner stating the global public cloud market is predicted to hit £277 billion by the end of 2023. Examples of these cloud-native technologies are containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure and declarative APIs.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation says that these technologies have enabled us to produce loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable and observable.
Cloud-based security includes the integration of security into organizations’ cloud-based application development plans. Using these approaches, secure applications can evolve in a variety of areas, including infrastructure, teams, and processes. However, the development and operations teams must first understand the importance of cloud-native technologies and the strategies behind them.
How Does Cloud Native Security Work?
Cloud Native refers to reinventing, innovating, and transforming how companies perform software development.
While shifting security to the left of software development is gaining popularity, having security at every checkpoint and integrating security throughout the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is much more efficient.
This shift-left method prioritizes security at the earliest SDLC stage—making it easier to fix vulnerabilities and prevent bottlenecks.
Cloud Native Security implements the same principle and addresses security concerns by fixing vulnerabilities correctly.
Here are a few efficient ways that Cloud Native Security works:
- Automated Deployment of Security Controls: Cloud Native Security uses automation to deploy security controls, like encryption and intrusion detection systems, to ensure updated and correct configuration of the security controls.
- Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): CI/CD pipelines enable fast and automated deployment of security patches and updates.
- Containerization: Cloud Native Security leverages containerization to secure and isolate data and applications.
- Microservices Architecture: Cloud Native Security uses a microservices architecture to reduce the impact of security concerns. If a security problem occurs in a microservice, it doesn’t always impact the entire application.
- Compliance: Cloud Native Security meets the regulatory standards and security certifications, like SOC 2 and ISO 27001, making organizations compliant with these standards.
- Cloud computing scalability and agility allow organizations to respond quickly and address the changing security needs and demands—making Cloud Native Security a flexible and efficient solution for cloud data and applications security.
Importance and Goals of Cloud Native Security
Cloud Native Security aims to enable a robust security framework to ensure the utmost data and applications security and minimize the risks of cybersecurity threats.
Here are the key benefits of Cloud Native Security:
#1. Improved Monitoring and Visibility
Cloud Native Security enables continuous testing throughout all the CI/CD layers, enabling security teams to track and address security issues at the system and component levels.
Thanks to Cloud Native applications, you can easily monitor the utilization and usage logs. Ensuring the staff and other team members have minimum access to the resources and tracking the usage statistics by creating dashboards, understanding the usage pattern becomes much easier.
Thus, it rejects unauthorized user access attempts and sends alerts to signal such attempts.
#2. Ease of Management
Automation is one of the primary differences between traditional and Cloud Native Security or applications.
Cloud Native Security makes resources automatically available, with the capabilities for automatic problem-solving, auto-scalability, and automatic remedial action—making management a breeze.
It guarantees better management and a straightforward user experience for the team members.
#3. Enhanced Customer Experience
In Cloud Native technology, application updates are sent and distributed in tiny batches as part of a testing process.
It automatically gathers user feedback and suggestions simultaneously to make the required changes. This process diminishes the concern about post-deployment and debugging, allowing developers to focus more on the characteristics of applications and customers’ responses to them.
#4. Automatic Threat Detection
The Cloud Native Security technology streamlines workflows and automatically identifies and removes threats by incorporating Machine Learning (ML) techniques and algorithms.
Its automated tools use past breach data mining and dynamic analysis tools to identify cybersecurity threats and notify the appropriate teams in advance. It secures and remediates the applications in real time with the help of event-driven mechanization in case of data breaches.
#5. Continuous Compliance Assurance
Cloud Native applications enable compatibility with rules and regulations relevant to the cloud infrastructure’s use. For instance, localization legislation and data sovereignty regulations are responsible for protecting data.
While these laws and regulations differ with different domains and countries, a cloud infrastructure ensures compliance with these regulations by default—setting a standard for cloud security measures.
#6. Seamless Deployment and Flexibility
Cloud Native Security and applications demand rapid deployments—making it easier for security teams to apply security fixes across multiple environments.
This is important because outdated software and applications may have critical security implications; hence, updating the cloud infrastructure with the latest security measures is essential to prevent and combat evolving cybersecurity threats.
#7. Reduced Development Cost
All the Cloud Native Technology applications use microservices, which you can easily migrate between multiple projects. Hence, whenever you need to make new applications, you must apply the old project’s microservices to the new one.
This process significantly reduces the development cost and allows developers to invest more time in the applications instead of the framework, as Cloud Native technology divides the framework into multiple services.
#8. Data Security
Cloud Native security uses powerful key-based data encryption algorithms to prevent external users and malicious hackers from accessing and intercepting data files and data that travel to and from the cloud. Moreover, you can restrict access to sensitive data to authorized users only—because of this, organizations like banks move their data to the cloud.
#9. Network Security
Cloud Native deployments enable enhanced network security—thanks to security measures like ongoing network traffic surveillance for reporting and customizable firewall rules.
It also logs user access to and from the applications and the network traffic in the review applications. This logging process of the application’s traffic flow develops a deep understanding of the application’s usage—making analyzing, detecting, and predicting network threats a breeze.
Thus, whether you want to manage vulnerabilities with ease and automate threat detection or enable high data security at an affordable cost, Cloud Native Security is a reliable option for your organization’s cloud infrastructure.
Conclusion
Gartner predicts that over half the spending of IT companies will be shifted from the traditional IT infrastructure to the public cloud by 2025—a jump from 41% in 2022.
However, of all the benefits these IT companies gain from cloud infrastructure, security remains one of the major challenges they face—mainly because of employee faults, misconfigurations, and inherent architectural vulnerabilities.
Hence, ensure you understand the importance, goals, benefits, and best practices of Cloud Native Security through this blog and the learning resources mentioned to enable a scalable and agile Cloud Native application infrastructure for your organization.
If you’re interested in cloud native technology and need support with your security, the team at BKPlus Software can help. As your dedicated cyber security advisor, we can ensure your security solution fits within the exact requirements of your business, the risks it faces, and operations. Contact us today to discuss getting a cyber security health check from us. Also, by speaking to our experts you can see how our cyber security services can benefit and support you. To keep your business running and growing safely online.
