Strengthening Multicloud Security in Government

Many state and local governments have transitioned to multicloud environments to increase their agility and meet new operational demands. Securing these environments presents ongoing challenges.

“Cloud is the biggest transformation that security has ever experienced. The cloud moves fast, and security must keep up,” says Chris Saunders,¹ a public sector sales engineering leader at Wiz, a leading cloud security provider for state and local governments.

The cloud provides unrivaled scalability and flexibility that allows governments to innovate, but these same characteristics can compromise security. Governments can address this risk by employing a multi-faceted approach enabled by emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and strategies such as Zero Trust.

Multicloud Security Risks

More and more governments use cloud infrastructure services, leaning on providers that use application programming interfaces (APIs) to make their systems extensible. But now government development and security teams must manage more complex architectures.

Traditional security models in government don’t provide the end-to-end visibility needed to secure multicloud environments. Data and users are on the outside of governments’ perimeter firewalls, creating security gaps hackers can easily exploit. Additionally, common security intelligence tools are often siloed — information from one tool may not correlate with or provide context for another.

Identity access management in multicloud environments is another huge challenge for governments. Managing identity in the cloud is very different from managing it on premises. In on-premises environments, everyone has their own authorization and access to the technologies they support. The cloud breaks this model by allowing developers to simply call up an API to get access to networking, storage and compute resources.

Self-service access and new ownership models also add complexity. Specific teams can spin up new cloud environments but may not be in the best position to manage an entire application stack and security. For example, an operating system team may be responsible for patching vulnerabilities, but they might be concerned about the external firewall being open to their workloads, or they might not be familiar with how containers or Kubernetes work.

“What you see now is siloed security alerts that aren’t correlated across your entire technology stack,” Saunders says.

A New Operating Model for Multicloud Security

Governments must scale cloud security now, especially as they expand their cloud footprint and accelerate digital transformation. To accomplish this, they will need to employ a multifaceted security strategy enabled by modern technologies such as a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP), which can provide the comprehensive view governments need to reduce risks.

A CNAPP provides self-service access so that any IT team can use security tools. The platform also correlates security risks across cloud applications and services to deliver end-to-end visibility.

“A CNAPP can show you why you have security flaws and where they are,” Saunders says.

The platform’s fully integrated services drive a standardized security policy across multiple points of inspection and a single policy for risk assessment across all artifacts, including containers, virtual machines, serverless functions and data storage. A unified back-end data model also enables users to look at all risk factors to reduce their organization’s potential attack surface.

A CNAPP delivers contextual security insights that allow teams to deeply understand relationships between the elements of an application, their security posture, permissions and connectivity. Teams can execute remediation anywhere across the application life cycle, from cloud back to code, and develop applications that are secure at the code level before deploying them in the cloud.

A CNAPP can also support a Zero-Trust strategy, which assumes every user, application or device requesting access to networks, systems and data is a potential threat. A CNAPP enables Zero Trust by connecting to an organization’s IT environment and building an inventory across the organization’s cloud technologies, containers, workloads, and AI and machine learning services. This helps teams identify and address critical risks in the cloud. Users can also access a graphical view of potential attack paths that shows their applications’ and systems’ greatest vulnerabilities and what steps they should take to address security gaps.

Organizations can also use a CNAPP to federate cloud security management. APIs connected to the CNAPP allow security teams to build their own custom dashboards, reports and tools. This approach can foster more effective security collaboration across departments in an organization.

Security and Constituent Services

Multicloud environments empower governments to digitize their operations; activate their data; and deliver more relevant, timely and impactful constituent services. However, these environments can also compromise public trust if security risks aren’t addressed.

“We’re in a different architecture now,” Saunders says. “Everything is in the cloud, and blind spots can become entry points for hackers.”

State and local governments should prepare for these risks with modern technologies like a CNAPP. By adopting advanced security measures and continuously monitoring their cloud environment, governments can build more resilient infrastructure that safeguards sensitive systems and data — and ensures they can deliver constituent services when it matters most.

[1] https://webinars.govtech.com/On-Cloud-9%3A-The-Public-Sectors-Path-to-Secure-Multicloud-Environments-142697.html