How to Improve Your Cloud Security Posture With Policy-as-Code

This article was originally published at Magalix:
https://www.magalix.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-cloud-security-posture-with-policy-as-code

“The cloud business model provides huge market incentives for cloud service providers to place a higher priority on security than is typical for end-user organizations.”
Jay Heiser, Gartner

The Cloud Environment: Advantages and Disadvantages

The cloud-native space undeniably offers many advantages: faster deployments, increased agility and resilience, lower risk, auto-scalability, and cost-effectiveness. However, the decentralized nature of the infrastructure raises many security issues that many organizations struggle with. Some firms also don’t know how many and what type of cloud resources they are running, much less configured. Moreover, serious misconfigurations often go undetected for days or weeks, and it can be very challenging to secure cloud services and applications.

The #1 Area Of Concern: Misconfigurations!

Gartner once predicted that by 2020, 95% of cloud security issues would be the result of misconfigurations or mistakes at the customer’s end. Recent events have shown that Gartner’s early pessimism is well-founded. In 2019 and 2020, cloud misconfiguration errors related to account permissions, password storage, and management, unencrypted data stores, etc., led…