Introduction:
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you wanted to prioritize the riskiest misconfigurations on cloud workloads across Azure, AWS, and GCP? Have you ever wondered how to implement a unified dashboard for cloud security posture across a multicloud environment?
This article covers how you can achieve these scenarios by using Defender Cloud Security Posture Management's (CSPM) native support for resources inside Azure, and resources in AWS and/or GCP.
For more information about Defender for Cloud’s multicloud support you can start at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/defender-for-cloud/multicloud
To help you understand how to use Defender for Cloud to prioritize riskiest misconfigurations across your multicloud environment, all inside of a single dashboard, this article covers three topic in the following sequence:
- Understanding the benefits of Defender CSPM for multicloud environments.
- Implementing a unified security dashboard for cloud security posture.
- Optimizing security response and compliance reporting.
Understand the benefits of Defender CSPM for multicloud environments:
When it comes to the plethora of different cloud service at your disposal, certain resource types could be more at risk than others, depending on how they’re configured, whether they’re exploitable and/or exposed to the Internet. Besides virtual machines, storage accounts, Kubernetes clusters, and databases come to mind.
Imagine if you have a compute resource, like an EC2 instance that is public exposed, with vulnerabilities and can access other resources in your environment. When combined together, these misconfigurations can represent a serious security risk to your environment, because an attacker might potentially use them to compromise your environment and move laterally inside of it.
For organizations pursuing a multicloud strategy, risky misconfigurations can even span public cloud providers. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you use compute resources in one public cloud provider and databases in another public cloud provider? If an organization is using more than one public cloud provider, this can represent risk of attackers potentially compromising resources inside of one environment, and using those resources to move to other public cloud environments.
Defender CSPM can help organizations close off potential entry points for attackers by helping them understand what misconfigurations in their environment they need to focus on first (figure 1), and by doing that, increase their overall security posture and minimize the risk of their environment getting compromised.
Figure 1: Prioritizing misconfigurations in an environment
Read the full post here: Cloud security posture and contextualization across cloud boundaries from a single dashboard