What is Cloud Visibility in Cybersecurity? Explained Clearly

To fully secure your cloud environment, it’s crucial to first understand what is cloud visibility in cybersecurity. The cloud has transformed security practices significantly. Development teams now operate in dynamic, decentralised environments, making it challenging to secure resources across diverse clouds and architectures. The shared nature of cloud environments introduces complexity, and teams taking ownership of infrastructure choices means traditional security tools may not adequately provide visibility or address cloud-specific risks.

Scaling security to meet these challenges requires a collaborative approach, where cloud development teams work together with security to address risks seamlessly within the development process. This approach should be self-service, accessible, and simplified for effective risk management, even without extensive security expertise.

To establish an effective cloud security workflow, three principles are crucial. First, comprehensive visibility across the entire cloud environment is essential for all stakeholders involved. Second, a proactive approach is necessary to identify and eliminate risks before they escalate. Finally, cloud security should be tightly integrated into the technology stack and development pipeline to operate efficiently across teams.

Organisations can achieve the modern cloud security operating model through a four-phase journey of continuous improvement. In this article I’ll take you through a visibility journey to optimise your rapidly growing cloud environments. I’ll provide achievable steps to build a strong security foundation and continue building upon it over time.

Why is visibility important?

Visibility plays a vital role in cloud security. It starts with understanding what is running in your cloud environments and how everything operates. Without visibility, it’s difficult to evaluate cloud security risks effectively.

If you’re early in your cloud journey, consider our cloud adoption guide for startups to establish robust visibility from the outset.

To achieve comprehensive visibility across all clouds and architectures, enabling a holistic understanding of resources, configurations, and vulnerabilities, we need to focus on three key outcomes:

  • 100% visibility: In the past, achieving comprehensive visibility across different cloud and architecture choices was complex. However, with the right tools, seamless visibility without the need for new technology is now a reality.
    • You don’t require specialised staff when adopting new cloud services or acquiring new organisations.
  • Normalisation: Consistent visibility across clouds and technologies simplifies security for all teams. It provides clear and easy-to-understand information at a glance. Standardised identity and entitlement models reduce administrative overhead.
  • Ownership: Security teams require broad visibility, but it can be distracting for developers. By segmenting visibility based on infrastructure ownership, developers can focus on their specific areas of responsibility, reducing noise, streamlining security tasks, and optimising staff efficiency.

What to look for in cloud visibility solutions

When searching for a full-stack visibility solution, consider the following capabilities:

  • Full cloud inventory: Your cloud journey may involve a single cloud service provider or multiple clouds.
    • Ensure that your cloud security foundation provides consistent visibility into all your cloud resources across different environments like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba, or hybrid cloud with VMware vSphere.
    • Modern cloud deployments involve various workloads, so having a complete inventory of your cloud resources is essential. This includes resources from different cloud service providers, hybrid clouds, and container platforms like Kubernetes and OpenShift.
    • Additionally, visibility aids in addressing common AWS security issues by highlighting vulnerabilities early.
  • Cross-architecture coverage: Comprehensive visibility means understanding different types of workloads, such as virtual machines, containers, serverless functions, and serverless containers.
  • Technology coverage: Your security team needs visibility into cloud services, deployed technologies within workloads, and the workloads themselves.
    • This includes operating systems, applications, APIs, databases, and code libraries.
    • In cloud storage scenarios, enhanced visibility can complement security measures such as AWS S3 and signed URLs.
  • Robust detection: Automatic and continuous detection is crucial in dynamic cloud environments. Traditional approaches that rely on agents deployed by developers have limitations and require a lot of effort. Instead, consider adopting an agentless approach that enables real-time monitoring of existing resources and automatic discovery of new workloads.
  • Configuration visibility: Cloud configuration includes core technologies that enable your workloads to function, such as Identity and Access Management (IAM), network settings, and platform-specific configurations like container image settings or access control policies in Kubernetes.

Role-focused visibility

Role Based Access Control (RBAC) facilitates collaboration and efficiency among development teams. Cloud inventories created for full-stack visibility should be simplified and tailored for each team, aligning the output with their specific infrastructure ownership. This allows developers to focus on the resources that are relevant to their projects, reducing distractions and optimising resource utilisation. Development teams should have access to the technologies used for populating and updating the cloud inventory to ensure the advantages of comprehensive cloud visibility are available where they count.

A modern approach to cloud visibility

Organisations should strive for automated and continuous visibility across their entire cloud environment. By embracing a modern approach to cloud security that prioritises visibility, organisations can enhance their overall security posture and effectively safeguard their assets in the cloud.

For tailored guidance to enhance your cloud security visibility, consider engaging a cloud security consultant.