Cloud security insights, thoughts, and ideas
This AWS Security Readiness Checklist is intended to help organizations evaluate their applications and systems before deployment on AWS. This evaluation is based on a series of best practices and is built off the Operational Checklists for AWS1. Read more “AWS Security Readiness Checklist”
DevOps is about seamless collaboration between Development and Operations, and you need to have the right tools in your environment to help make this possible. As everyone knows, DevOps covers a lot of functional areas, so knowing what tools to adopt can be a challenge.
Today’s market offers a huge array of both open source and proprietary tools, and together they can answer nearly every need throughout the DevOps lifecycle from Planning to Deployment to Monitoring and ongoing Improvement. When these are coupled with a comprehensive security solution like Threat Stack’s Cloud Security Platform®, they can also help to enable security and compliance: It’s a matter of understanding what each tool offers, matching the right ones to your requirements, and investing the time needed to train your team to use them to their highest potential.
To help you make your way through the almost endless list of tools out there, we’ve used this post to compile a list of 50 great DevOps tools that you might want to consider when you’re looking for a solution that will help streamline, automate, or improve specific aspects of your workflow. Read more “50 Great DevOps Tools You May Not Be Using”
Recently, there has been a significant upswing in the adoption of containerized environments. In light of this, we’ve written a number of posts that focus on the advantages that containers afford and ways to ensure that you’re following security best practices when deploying and operating them. Most recently, we published Docker Security Tips & Best Practices, which identifies common container security issues together with best practices for reducing risk and increasing operational efficiency in containerized environments.
Along with the spike in container adoption, there has been a corresponding uptake in the use of container orchestration platforms, so in this post, we’re providing tips on how to address security issues when using Kubernetes, the most widely adopted container orchestration platform. Read more “Kubernetes Security Tips & Best Practices”
Securing any cloud infrastructure is a big job. You need to be constantly up to date on skills, tools, and technology, as well as the vulnerabilities and threats that crop up continuously. When it comes to security, becoming stagnant is not an option. A good cloud security professional only remains on top by keeping up with the latest cloud security trends, emerging threats, and best practices.
That’s where cloud security conferences come in, bringing together top experts, cloud security thought leaders, and industry professionals to share tips, tricks, and the latest tactics for bolstering cloud security in the modern landscape.
With the spring conference season kicking off, we’ve rounded up 40 cloud security conferences, grouped by quarter, so you can easily plan your schedule for 2019. For the most part, we’ve focused on North America — but keeping in mind that security is a global issue, of course — we’ve also included a few key events that are being held in other locations.
(For more first rate resources on cloud security, visit our list of the 50 best cloud security training resources, or subscribe to some of our favorite cloud security podcasts to stay on top of the latest cloud security news, emerging threats, and best practices.)
Before jumping into the 2019 conference offerings, take a look at one of the shows we’re most excited about — the new AWS re:Inforce Conference that’s coming up right in our backyard (Boston, MA) on June 25 and 26. Read more “The Best Cloud Security Conferences to Attend in 2019”
Docker is a software platform that makes it easier to create, deploy, and run applications. Recently there has been a major surge in the adoption of this technology — and while it offers significant benefits, it also presents security challenges. Some of the advantages center on the fact that your applications are loaded into a private namespace and the required dependencies are codified, and when using Docker, developers can package all the parts needed to run an application stack and ship it out as one unit. But if container ecosystems aren’t properly designed, deployed, and managed, they can create problems that offset or undermine the benefits.
To put you on the path to effective and secure usage, this post identifies common security issues and outlines best practices for reducing risk and increasing operational efficiency in containerized environments. (If you want additional resources to brush up on your Docker skills, take a look at our list of 50 useful Docker Tutorials for IT professionals.) Read more “Docker Security Tips & Best Practices”
As we enter the first days of 2019, it’s a great time to look back at the tremendous momentum we built up at Threat Stack over the last year. We entered 2018 fresh off a new round of funding with a mission to provide customers with the full stack cloud security observability needed to enable DevSecOps and reduce mean-time-to-know (MTTK) for security incidents across diverse cloud infrastructure. We ended the year with a more comprehensive cloud security platform along with strong growth across the business — and plans in place to carry this momentum forward into 2019. None of this has been due to a lucky accident: It’s the direct result of amazing work and dedication from the entire Threat Stack team as we continued our relentless pursuit to deliver the industry’s best cloud security products and services. Read more “Threat Stack Continues 2018’s Momentum Into 2019”
Making the transition from virtual machines to containers is a complex process that can take some time, particularly for larger, more complex environments. Users are drawn to Kubernetes’ container-centric environment, as well as its ability to enable portability across infrastructure providers. Kubernetes also offers broad applicability; for the most part, an application that runs well in a container will run well on Kubernetes. These, along with myriad other benefits, are what make the transition to Kubernetes worthwhile for many applications. Not up-to-date on the ins and outs of Kubernetes? Check out our list of 50 Useful Kubernetes Tutorials for IT Professionals to get started.
Because the process can be both lengthy and complex, mistakes are common during a transition. First, it’s important to understand that Kubernetes is not a silver bullet. Organizations that adopt container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes before they really understand the technology are more vulnerable to configuration errors. There are also some important Kubernetes security considerations, such as blast radius (how far a malicious party can gain access beyond the initial point of compromise), that leave certain components of a cluster more vulnerable. That’s why it’s important to build security into your deployment as early as possible. To find out where your security maturity level stands, take our Cloud SecOps Maturity Assessment, and learn more about how Threat Stack can secure your containerized environments.
If you’re ready to get started with your infrastructure transformation, there are other pitfalls you’ll want to avoid. To help you get off on the right foot and avoid common mistakes, we reached out to a panel of developers and Kubernetes experts and asked them to answer this question:
AWS Security Groups are a flexible tool to help you secure your Amazon EC2 instances. AWS Security Groups are just one of several tools AWS offers to help you secure your cloud environment, but that doesn’t mean AWS security is hands-off. You’re still responsible for securing your applications and data in the cloud, and that means you need to leverage additional tools, such as Threat Stack, to gain better visibility and take a proactive approach to security in the cloud. Threat Stack is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner, offering an intrusion detection platform that’s built in AWS, to serve AWS.
As we found in a recent survey, nearly three-fourths of companies have at least one critical AWS security misconfiguration. That’s why it’s imperative to understand the various tools AWS makes available to users and how to best utilize them to keep your data secure. Here’s a look at how AWS Security Groups work, the two main types of AWS Security Groups, and best practices for getting the most out of them. Read more “AWS Security Groups: What They Are and How to Get the Most Out of Them”
A cloud workload is a distinct capacity or work function that we put on a cloud instance. It can be a Hadoop node, a Web server, a database, or a container, among other things.
Broadly speaking, therefore, cloud workload security is any means of protecting these workloads.
There is a common misconception that securing your workloads is the responsibility of the cloud service provider. But that’s not true if you work with an “infrastructure as a service” (IaaS) model such as Amazon Web Services. With IaaS, you share some of that responsibility. In some instances, you would need to extend the security policies, tools, and controls you have for your onsite systems to the cloud in order to secure these workloads. A widespread failure to fully understand and act on the shared responsibility model is demonstrated in a November 2017 survey, where we found that 73% of companies have at least one critical AWS security misconfiguration.
With Threat Stack, a leader in cloud-native security and compliance management, you can better secure your cloud environment and cloud workloads. Our Cloud Security Platform® is designed to meet the unique challenges facing Security and Operations teams working in the cloud. Let’s take a look at the common threats facing cloud workloads along with best practices for enhancing cloud workload security. Read more “What is Cloud Workload Security?”
One of the biggest benefits of the Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform® is the deep level of visibility we bring to observing operator behaviors in customers’ cloud runtime environments. We frame this discussion in terms of “security observability,” and it can be distilled into a single question: “If suspicious or risky behaviors occur on one of your servers, what can you see and how quickly can you see it?” Read more “Threat Stack Introduces Bulk Data Export Feature”