5 cloud application security best practices

Who owns cloud application security?

As cloud-native application development grows in popularity, it’s becoming more critical for security, development, and operations teams to share responsibility for cloud application security. This evolving approach to application security, where developers are taking on additional AppSec responsibility, is called DevSecOps. Even with the adoption of DevSecOps growing, less than 10% of security professionals believed developers were responsible for the security of cloud-native environments and applications, so ownership over cloud application security will likely evolve over the coming years.

Why is it important to implement cloud security policies and frameworks?

When using cloud platforms, data may be exposed. Implementing robust cloud security policies and frameworks is crucial to:

• Protect sensitive data: Organizations that store sensitive data in the cloud need to protect it from hackers. To keep data safe, it’s best to encrypt business information, like customer and financial data, during transactions and when in storage.

• Reduce the risk of breaches: Security policies define best practices for Identity and Access Management (IAM), encryption, and threat monitoring to minimize vulnerabilities.

• Ensure compliance: Implementing a security framework helps meet compliance requirements such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS, CRA, and OWASP Top 10 and avoid costly penalties. 

• Strengthen visibility and control: A structured security framework gives organizations clear guidelines on securing workloads, managing user permissions, and detecting anomalies before they escalate into incidents.

• Improve incident response: Well-documented security policies ensure teams know how to respond to threats rapidly, reducing downtime and mitigating potential damage. 

What are cloud application security issues?

Cloud application security issues are cyber threats that a cloud-based application is exposed. These threats can include:

• Unauthorized access to application functionality or data

• Exposed application services due to misconfigurations

• Hijacking of user accounts because of poor encryption and identity management

• Data leakage from insecure APIs or other infrastructure endpoints

• Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks related to poorly managed resources

How to monitor and limit security attacks in cloud environments?

Cloud environments are frequent targets of cyber attacks. Monitoring activity and limiting potential threats is important to secure a cloud environment. Here’s how organizations can fortify their cloud infrastructure:

• Allow continuous monitoring: Use security tools that provide real-time threat detection, logging, and alerts. 

• Implement access controls: Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) and role-based access control to prevent unauthorized access. 

• Conduct regular security audits: Review security configurations, perform vulnerability scans, and test for weaknesses. 

• Automate security responses: implement automated threat response systems that block or mitigate attacks instantly, helping organizations speed up incident response. 

Cloud application best practices for effective security

Cloud application security requires a comprehensive approach to secure the application itself and the infrastructure it runs on. Here are five cloud application best practices for implementing effective security measures:

1. Identity access management

2. Encryption

3. Threat monitoring

4. Data privacy and compliance

5. Automated security testing

5 cloud application security best practices

1. Identity access management

Application security doesn’t exist in a silo, so it’s essential to integrate secure measures like IAM with broader enterprise security processes. IAM ensures every user is authenticated and can only access authorized data and application functionality. A holistic approach to IAM can protect cloud applications and improve the overall security posture of an organization.

2. Encryption

Implementing encryption in the right areas optimizes application performance while protecting sensitive data. Generally, the three types of data encryption to consider are encryption in transit, encryption at rest, and encryption in use.

• Encryption in transit protects data as it’s transmitted between cloud systems or to end-users. This includes encrypting communication between two services, whether they’re internal or external, so that unauthorized third parties cannot intercept data.

• Encryption at rest ensures unauthorized users cannot read data while stored in the cloud. This can include multiple layers of encryption at the hardware, file, and database levels to protect sensitive application data from data breaches.

• Encryption in use protects data that is currently being processed, which is often the most vulnerable data state. Keeping data in use safe involves limiting access beforehand using IAM, role-based access control, digital rights protection, and more.

Leveraging encryption for data in each of these stages can reduce the risk of cloud applications leaking sensitive data. This is crucial for achieving a high level of security and privacy that protects organizations from intellectual property theft, reputational damage, and revenue loss.

3. Threat monitoring

After applications are deployed to the cloud, it is crucial to continuously monitor them for cyber threats in real time. Since the application security threat landscape is constantly evolving, leveraging threat intelligence data is essential for staying ahead of malicious actors. This enables development teams to find and remediate cloud application security threats before they impact end-users.

4. Data privacy & compliance

Along with application security, data privacy and compliance are crucial for protecting end-users of cloud-native applications. For example, compliance with GDPR requires careful vetting of open source components, which are frequently used to speed up cloud-native application development. In addition, data encryption, access controls, and other cloud security controls can also help protect the privacy of application users.

5. Automated security testing

A key part of DevSecOps is integrating automated security testing directly into the development process. By automatically scanning for vulnerabilities throughout the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) process, development teams can ensure every new software build is secure before deploying to the cloud. This includes the code and open source libraries that applications rely on as well as the container images and infrastructure configurations they’re using for cloud deployments.

In addition, implementing developer-friendly security scanning tooling with existing developer workflows can empower the “shifting left” of cloud application security. Shifting left testing can dramatically reduce the cost of vulnerability detection and remediation while also ensuring developers can continue pushing code quickly.

Stay protected with Snyk Cloud Security solutions

Many organizations are adopting cloud native application development to build modern software faster than ever before, but the nature of applications and the infrastructure they’re deployed on has fundamentally changed. That’s why it’s critical that today’s development and security teams understand these best practices for keeping cloud native applications secure.

Learn more

For more resources on Cloud Application Security, check out these articles:

• Measuring the success of cloud native application security

• Cloud security challenges

• The state of cloud native application security report

• Enterprise Cloud Security

• Cloud Compliance and Compliance Tools