What is Code to Cloud Security? Benefits & Challenges

Code security is a proactive approach to preventing the introduction of vulnerabilities into the code while it is written. With a growing number of cloud-native applications and the adoption of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, security must be ensured at every stage of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) from the beginning to deployment and runtime. That’s where Code to Cloud Security comes into play.

Here, we’ll focus on the importance of Code to Cloud Security, its impact on organizational security posture, how companies can adopt it, and the best practices to ensure optimum results.

What is Code to Cloud Security?

Code to Cloud Security refers to the integration of robust security at every stage of an application’s lifecycle from when the first lines of code are written to as long as the application is operational. The basic principle of Code to Cloud Security is the amalgamation of secure coding practices and unique security considerations for cloud environments.

What is the need for Code to Cloud Security?

Granular visibility, early detection, and effective triage are some of the core capabilities that Code to Cloud Security brings to organizations. When juxtaposed with the traditional, siloed approach to cyber defense, the effectiveness of Code to Cloud Security is quite remarkable.

1. Coping with dynamic environments

Traditional security relies heavily on perimeter defense and static configurations whereas cloud environments are extremely dynamic with rapid provisioning and de-provisioning of resources. Code to Cloud Security allows an organization to deal with the unique and dynamic security requirements of cloud-native applications.

2. Securing Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

IaC practices are central to cloud infrastructure management. Ensuring the consistent and automatic employment of modern security practices and policies as infrastructure is developed is vital for the IaC approach to succeed.

3. Securing Microservices and Containers

The use of microservices and containers significantly expands the attack surface. A point-in-time approach to security testing and management is bound to struggle when it comes to establishing vigilance over these architectures. Code to Cloud security focuses on securing each component of the application making it easier to deal with expanding attack surfaces.

4. Elasticity and adaptability

Cloud-hosted applications change and grow fast. Organizations try to maintain a fast release cycle and the Agile methodology assists in the same. If the security mechanism isn’t elastic enough to scale rapidly, it is bound to open the application up to exploits. This is another reason why the adoption of Code to Cloud Security is imperative for cloud-native apps.

Some Key Components of Code to Cloud Security

Code to Cloud Security aims to integrate security practices into the DevOps workflow. It breaks silos and improves alert management and triage capabilities with a focus on automated monitoring, logging, and incident response.

1. Secure Coding Practices

Secure coding practices ensure that the code is resistant to exploits. This is guided by well-established standards that involve ensuring proper input validation, avoiding buffer overflow, securing sensitive data storage, avoiding SQL injection and cross-site scripting, and using secure libraries and frameworks, among other things.

2.  Integrating Security with the CI/CD pipeline 

The integration of security testing into the Continuous Integration/Continuous Development or the CI/CD pipeline ensures that the code goes through static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST) before deployment. This ensures security in all development phases.

3.  DevSecOps Integration

This refers to breaking the silos that separate development, security, and operations to foster collaboration and ensure thorough security integration with more opportunities for security automation.

4.  Vulnerability Management

This involves scanning applications for known vulnerabilities at regular intervals both during development and in deployment environments. This is to make sure that a cloud-hosted application does not fall prey to common vulnerabilities.

5.  Runtime Protection

Monitoring applications while they’re in operation is a critical part of cloud security. This may involve the use of a Cloud Native Security platform or separate mechanisms like intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) and web application firewalls (WAF).

6.  Identity and Access Management

Implementing strict access controls to protect cloud resources is an essential component of Code for Cloud Security. This may involve the adoption of a zero-trust architecture, the use of multi-factor authentication, monitoring access patterns, and maintaining audit trails.

How Does Code to Cloud Security Work?

You can classify the Code to Cloud approach to security into two broad areas

1. Securing code before it’s deployed to the cloud
2. Tracing security issues in the cloud environment back to the code

You can further break the first area down into five processes.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) to Identify Risky Code During Development

• SCA scans your codebase for third-party components like open-source libraries and frameworks.

• Then, it checks how the components are tied to each other and how a vulnerability in one might affect others. This is called dependency mapping.

• Once the third-party components are identified and mapped, they are checked against a database of known vulnerabilities. Any match is flagged as a potential risk.

Vulnerability identification apart, SCA also looks for licensing requirements for different components to ensure compliance.

SAST and DAST

SAST or Static Application Security Testing examines the source code without running the program. It identifies potential vulnerabilities in the code with high accuracy.

DAST tests applications for security weaknesses in their operational state. It simulates attack scenarios to find vulnerabilities, prioritizes them, and suggests possible steps for remediation.

Securing the IaC Codebase

Infrastructure as Code forms the bedrock of your cloud-native application. Any security vulnerability or configuration error in the IaC codebase translates into vulnerabilities in the deployed infrastructure. There are four main steps to securing the IaC codebase:

1. Scanning the IaC templates like Terraform and AWS CloudFormation for misconfiguration and policy violations
2. Implementing version control systems to ensure visibility and enable rollback if needed
3. Using IaC testing frameworks to validate the IaC code before deployment
4. Implementing strict access controls to ensure only authorized personnel can modify the code

Secret Scanning

Hardcoding secrets into the codebase is an age-old practice among developers. However, if exposed, these hardcoded secrets can pose a significant threat to applications, cloud applications and organizations. Hence, scanning for hardcoded passwords and API keys is an important part of code security.

Now, we move on to the second area, i.e. tracing cloud security issues back to code.

It is important to trace security issues found in Virtual Machines (VMs), Containers, serverless functions, and cloud-hosted APIs back to the code efficiently. Certain types of platforms can help with the identification and remediation of such issues.

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)

A CWPP offers real-time visibility into your cloud workloads.

• It continuously monitors your workloads to look for unauthorized access attempts, malware execution, and other suspicious activities.
• It also runs regular scans to find misconfigurations, outdated resources, and other potential security weaknesses.
• CWPP also helps with cloud network segmentation to restrict lateral movement in the event of a breach.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

CSPM involves four core practices that help you measure and maintain the health of your cloud resources.

• Monitoring cloud resources across various services
• Identifying compliance gaps and suggesting remedial action
• Detecting and prioritizing threats based on severity and exploitability
• Automating the remediation of configuration issues.

Web Application and API Protection (WAAP)

The purpose of Web Application and API Protection is to identify and prevent threat factors like cross-site scripting, DDoS attacks, brute-forcing, etc. WAAP plays a vital role in tracing security issues in cloud deployments back to code.

How Does Code to Cloud Security Address Organizational Security Challenges?

Agile workflows and the CI/CD model have brought a lot of speed and scalability to organizations but these changes have also triggered the evolution of the threat landscape. The number of attack surfaces has grown significantly with the growing use of microservices and containerized components. Add the popularity of hybrid work, ‘bring your own device’ culture, and the consequent increase in shadow IT to that, and you have a recipe for disaster ready at hand.

Code to Cloud Security is a perfect way of defusing this ticking time bomb. Here’s why:

1. Layered Abstraction for Better Alert Management

Code to Cloud Security adopts a layered abstraction approach to protecting applications at different stages of development and deployment. Robust security testing at each layer – secure coding, securing IaC codebase, and cloud platform security – creates multiple fail safes. With continuous monitoring and management in each layer, the alert management process becomes very easy.

2. Shadow IT Monitoring with Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)

The use of unauthorized and unsanctioned applications can land organizations into all sorts of trouble from data breaches to compliance violations. Code to Cloud Security leverages CASB as a gateway for all network traffic. It detects unauthorized services and alerts the IT department.

3. Offsetting the Lack of Security Personnel

Adopting a strong Cloud Security Platform like SentinelOne can offset the absence of a dedicated security team that can monitor and manage security throughout an application’s life cycle. With secure practices embedded and managed at every stage of SDLC and runtime, organizations have little to worry about.

4. Keeping Pace with the Evolving Threat Landscape

Cloud Security integrates vast amounts of threat intelligence feeds into the code and cloud protection mechanism. It helps organizations stay up-to-date with the current state of the threat landscapes, tackle zero-day vulnerabilities with speed and efficiency, and maintain a stable security posture.

5. Compliance management

With granular visibility into the entire application lifecycle, audits become stress-free. Depending on the industry vertical they fall under, organizations may have the obligation to comply with different standards set by regulatory bodies such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and GDPR among others. With security taken care of at every stage of the SDLC, it becomes easy for organizations to maintain compliance.

What Are the Benefits of Code to Cloud Security?

The organizational impact of Code to Cloud Security that we have discussed so far points to some tangible benefits for organizations.

1. Ease of vulnerability management

The integration of security into the DevOps process ensures that vulnerabilities are detected and mitigated early. This significantly reduces the risk of exploits in production.

2. Thorough application of security policies

From code creation to deployment and runtime, security policies are applied consistently. This mitigates the risk of insider threats by minimizing access and ensures comprehensive protection and compliance.

3. Security automation

Automated security testing at different stages of the SDLC combined with automated enforcement of security policies saves organizations hundreds of hours on top of enhancing security.

Code to Cloud Security scales easily as an organization grows. It helps with business continuity management and brings the risk of violations and penalties significantly.

Code to Cloud Security Best Practices

Here are nine best practices that help with the successful implementation of the Code to Cloud model of security:

1. Developers must undergo training in secure coding practices with security professionals. This reduces vulnerabilities from the very beginning. This includes proper input validation, prevention of injection errors, and using version control and peer review.
2. Integrating security into the CI/CD pipeline is another necessary step. It leads to the detection and remediation of vulnerabilities before every release.
3. Security best practices must be applied to infrastructure configurations.
4. Data must be encrypted in transit and at rest. Organizations must adopt a stable key management system to ensure security.
5. Implementing the principle of least privilege and zero trust when applicable is essential for establishing strong access controls.
6. The use of CWPP, and CSPM, as we discussed earlier is a necessity.
7. Organizations need a robust incident response plan with clearly defined roles and responsibilities to minimize damages in the event of a breach.
8. Staying up to date with the latest threat intelligence feeds is essential for an organization to stay on top of evolving security threats.
9. Keen vigilance over compliance and governance is to be maintained at all levels.

How Does SentinelOne Help with Code to Cloud Security?

SentinelOne gives you an all-in-one Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) that manages everything we have discussed so far.

The Singularity Cloud Security Platform by SentinelOne brings together Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM), Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR), and AI Security Posture Management.

• You get agentless deployment of your CSPM in minutes. SentinelOne’s 1-click threat remediation fixes critical vulnerabilities and security issues automatically.
• You monitor and protect any workload – containers, Kubernetes, VMs, serverless functions – with an award-winning AI-powered CWPP.
• With the AI-SPM, you can easily discover and check AI pipelines and models.

These capabilities just begin to scratch the surface of what SentinelOne brings on to the table. You must check out the Cloud-Native Security Platform to get the full picture.

Here are some more features that help you understand the comprehensive approach of the SentinelOne Cloud Security Platform.

1. Comprehensive vulnerability management with shift-left scanning and runtime scanning. Singularity Cloud Workload Security (CWS) secures hybrid cloud workloads and offers forensic visibility of workload telemetry.
2. CI/CD integration, custom STAR rules, Snyk integration and over 2,000+ built-in checks for cloud workload misconfigurations.
3. Unique Offensive Security Engine™ with Verified Exploit Paths™ to prevent lateral movement. Singularity Cloud Native Security (CNS) automates red-teaming, presents evidence-based findings, and visualizes attack paths with the Graph Explorer
4. Cloud asset discovery and automated penetration testing to expand security beyond the scope of CSPM; SentinelOne offers identity attack surface management features, cloud audits, and agentless vulnerability assessments.
5. Real-time secrets scanning for over 750+ types, including Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scanning capabilities. SentinelOne supports over 700 checks across popular IaC frameworks like TerraForm, CloudFormation, Helm, etc.

Overall, SentinelOne manifests Code to Cloud Security at its best with a comprehensive grip on every stage of the application. The platform is built on an eBPF architecture and even offers AI-powered data security for Amazon S3. To prevent downstream data risks, SentinelOne launched Threat Detection for Amazon S3 (TD4S3) and leverages its proprietary Static AI Engine for machine-speed malware analysis, policy enforcement, and file quarantine.

Conclusion

Code to Cloud Security is the future of application security as a whole. The faster companies can adopt and adapt to this granular yet expansive approach to security, the better. At the end of the day, Code to Cloud Security will help the bottom line by A. reducing the cost of maintaining siloed security operations and B. reducing the potential loss of money, reputation, and business due to data breaches and compliance violations. SentinelOne is the perfect security partner to cushion your landing into this fresh and unavoidable approach to security.