8 Best Cloud Application Security Best Practices

Cloud Application Security Best Practices keep safe to applications. Cloud Computing is one of the widely used technology in the present era. Cloud-native technologies are playing an important role to empower the organization.

Organizations are building and running scalable applications in a dynamic environment like private, public, and hybrid where the requirements are changing. Cloud-native applications are emerging approaches used for designing and building software.

Microservices, containers, immutable infrastructure, and APIs are the backbone of cloud-native applications. Their use is increasing day by day. Security of all these components is the major issue. Cloud native applications must be secured in the application context.

This tutorial we have explained eight Cloud Application Security Best Practices. These cloud computing security services are explained in context to cloud native applications so we have said cloud application security.

Table of content

We will cover the following topic and subtopics in this tutorial. We will discuss Cloud Application Security Best Practices in the end.

Introduction of Cloud Native.
Importance of Cloud Native.
What are cloud native application
What is Cloud Native Security?
Various Security Considerations in Cloud Native Applications
Conclusion and Summary

Let’s start with introduction of Cloud Native

What is Cloud Native?

Cloud native is just an approach used to build and update the application quickly, and also improve the quality of development.
Cloud native can be seen as a package or collection of Software, services and design approaches used to build the system architecture and cloud is hosting platform.
Cloud native approach provides a consistent development and automated management realization across the private, public, and hybrid cloud.

Why Cloud Native?

The purpose of the cloud native approach is to build and run the responsive, fault tolerance, secure and scalable application by taking the benefits of the capabilities of various cloud environments.
Cloud native also provides the facility to integrate methodologies that makes fasters development and deployment.

What are Cloud Native Applications?

Cloud-native applications are the software programs and services that are built and designed using cloud-native approach.
Cloud-native applications are fundamentally container-native applications. Developers who are familiar with containers and related frameworks such as Kubernetes are required to build the cloud native applications.
Developers should have knowledge and experience in the design and development of microservices-based application architectures that are executed in Kubernetes.

What is Cloud Native Security?

Cloud Native Applications must be secured in the application context. It is important to detect where the security is needed in cloud native infrastructure?

Cloud native Security ensures the vulnerabilities are identified and corrected during the design and development process.
Security should be review at the end of each phase of the software development life cycle.

Cloud Application Security Best Practices

To make native applications secure it is important to understand the application context run time. Application context covers all those activities that occur when a client makes a request to an application. In cloud native applications API work as an interface between client and system. The client connects to API and submits a request to the back end and a third-party service is used to implement the business logic.

Security implications in cloud native infrastructure differ from the security consideration used in the traditional environment. Top 8 Cloud Application Security Best Practices for cloud native applications are as follow –

(1) Continuous Security

In cloud native environment software delivery and deployment is a continuous process. Most companies such as Amazon are doing hundreds of deployments per day. In such a type of environment, security checks must be lightweight and continuous and should be embedded into the deployment tool.

(2) Protecting Server workloads is Essential

In cloud native infrastructure we may not depend on a fixed route, gateway, and network space so instead of securing the endpoints or network perimeter alone we should also focus on securing the data-centered and server workloads.

(3) Run time speed and Scale detection

In cloud native applications the deployment and upgrading is a continuous process. So monitoring and detection become more complex and difficult to execute. Here attack detection should be implemented and work dynamically. Scale detection should also be work dynamically.

(4) Hybrid Stack Protection

In cloud native applications this is not mandatory that all the micro services run in the same container. Some micro services run in a container on a virtual machine and some other run on bare metal machine. In this case security techniques used to protect the host, virtual machine layer, and Container work separately. Integrating them is changing security considerations.

(5) Principles used for threat detection

It is necessary to perform the unit testing of every newly generated threat detection

The rule before its implementation. This can be done by writing the script or simulating the generated rule through attack detection.

Integration testing should also be performed to ensure the quality and reliability of the detection program. Threat detection functions need continuous improvement. To do this you have to establish a feedback loop with your cloud infrastructure components. This feedback loop will help you to assure the quality of your threat detection program.

(6) High Visibility

Visibility is an important aspect of cloud application security. Due to lack of visibility and central administration, it may be not possible to detect any misconfiguration in the system. This undetected misconfiguration may introduce a risk that can not be quantified.

(7) Support for investigation at the time of Scaling

Since in cloud native applications all components and APIs are not residing in one place they are connected in a distributed manner so security investigation is more complex. There should be a continuous monitoring and security investigation that can minimize the impact on performance and demand of storage at the time of scaling the system.

(8) Integration with orchestration and automated tools

In cloud native infrastructure several tools such as Kubernetes, Openshift, Amazon ECS, or Google GKE are used to orchestrating your container workloads.

To automate the deployment you may also use Chef, Puppet, or Ansible to automate deployments. Security tools can be deployed automatically along with the workload to be protected.

Conclusion and Summary

To make the Cloud native applications more secure a technique should be implemented that performs continuous monitoring and automatically learn the changes in the application behavior.

Automatically threat detection mechanism should be implemented. Tracking of application context should perform in real-time due to the dynamic nature of the cloud environment. Changes in application such as changes in code, API, and configuration should be automatically adapted.

Software developers and security professionals should work together to build a secure application or to protect the application and the application should be responsive to attack.

I hope that these cloud application security practices will be helpful to enhance your cloud computing knowledge.