How to Optimize Security in Cloud-Native Applications
In recent years, businesses have become increasingly dependent on cloud-native applications, which makes them more attractive to threat actors. Today’s enterprise security teams need to prioritize the security of these assets to prevent large-scale disruptions and breaches.
According to IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach report, 45% of cyberattacks are now cloud-based. In July 2024, Microsoft’s Azure sustained a significant DDoS attack, which saw critical services halt for nearly 10 hours. That’s a lot of downtime for a business that depends on these services to deliver uninterrupted service to its customers.
With that in mind, let’s see how we can optimize the security of cloud-native applications to prevent such scenarios and ensure the resilience and reliability of critical cloud-based services.
Mastering User Controls
The human factor will always play a major part in the security of digital assets, including cloud-native applications. Unless we are entirely replaced by robots soon, humans will continue to make big decisions regarding the code, configuration and ultimately, the security of applications. That’s a lot of pressure, as one small mistake can lead to significant vulnerabilities and expose our cloud assets to attacks and operational mishaps.
One logical solution is to focus on education and training so that developers and users understand potential risks and learn to implement robust security protocols and best practices.
But when it comes to technical measures, the focus should be on strong identity and access management (IAM). The principle of least privilege is the go-to approach for implementing strong IAM. It ensures that users are granted the minimum access necessary to complete their tasks, significantly reducing the attack surface and risk from compromised accounts.
Take the time to create a minimal role or set of permissions for each serverless function or container. This way, if an element in the cloud-native architecture is compromised, it will cause minimal damage and won’t easily escalate to other components.
One mistake to avoid here is limiting access level reviews to infrequent intervals. Access should be continuously monitored and adjusted as job duties evolve (or dissolve). Regularly assess and update roles to ensure that access permissions remain appropriate and aligned with current responsibilities.
Streamlined Security Testing
If there is one advantage that cloud-native apps have over traditional development, it is the ability to leverage more granular and automated security testing. Cloud-native environments can take advantage of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. This enables developers to integrate security testing into every stage of development, making it a fundamental aspect of the software development lifecycle, rather than an afterthought.
There are various open-source tools and application security services available to enhance security testing. Automated tools can be employed to ensure that your code is free of misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, and sensitive data isn’t accidentally exposed. These tools can scan for known vulnerabilities, check for compliance with security best practices and even identify potential areas of risk in real time.
Automated continuous monitoring is another crucial aspect of streamlining your cloud-native security. There are two ways to implement this effectively. You can integrate monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack or Datadog to collect, analyze and visualize security logs and metrics in real-time. Alternatively, you can instruct the application itself to collect and aggregate security log data by embedding custom code for logging, metrics collection and monitoring.
For optimal security, you can combine these two approaches and have all logs direct to a centralized service like Splunk for real-time analysis. From there, you can define alert rules based on specific conditions, which will send notifications directly to services like Slack or email, ensuring timely alerts to help your team react quickly.
Vigilant API Management
Application programming interfaces (APIs) are the primary channel that cloud-native applications use for communication between various microservices and components. Just remember that since they facilitate data transactions, they are also a significant attack vector and an attractive target for exploitation.
Implementing strong authentication and authorization mechanisms for all your API endpoints should be among the first things on your list. 0Auth 2.0 is the industry standard for API authorization, allowing applications to access resources on behalf of a user without exposing their credentials.
Rate limiting is another critical measure. This will limit how many requests a single user can make within a specified timeframe, preventing potential denial of service (DoS) attacks.
Finally, you want to make sure your APIs are safe from common attacks such as injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). Proper input validation and sanitization are standard security measures that help mitigate a wide range of threats. Input validation ensures that all inputs received by the API is in the correct format, which will prevent potentially harmful data from being processed. For example, an API handling JSON data should validate that the Content-Type header of incoming requests is ‘application/json’ and that the data itself is valid JSON.
Final Thoughts
The increasing prevalence of cloud-based cyberattacks serves as a stern reminder that security should not take second place to convenience. We must proactively fight against these threats by designing secure cloud-native architecture and implementing comprehensive security measures throughout the SDLC.
Looking into the future, how well we secure cloud-native applications will be the determining factor in the success and stability of our digital infrastructure and the critical services we depend on.
