Stronger Cloud Security in Five: Securing Your Cloud Identities

After covering cloud security posture management (CSPM) and cloud workload protection (CWP) in the first two installments of Tenable’s “Stronger Cloud Security in Five” blog series, today we focus on securing your cloud identities. Protecting them is a tall order, but it’s critical because identities are your cloud security perimeter. Read on to learn more about how to secure them.

Cloud environments are dizzyingly dynamic and can have tens of thousands of human and service identities, each with its own access rights and identity risks – making your cloud identity security landscape highly complex.

In fact, identity and access management (IAM) ranked as the second most critical threat to cloud environments in the Cloud Security Alliance’s “Top Threats to Cloud Computing 2024” report.

“As cyber threats become more sophisticated, securing sensitive information against unauthorized access becomes increasingly daunting, making the robust implementation and continual refinement of IAM strategies indispensable to fortifying cybersecurity defenses,” the CSA tells us.

As Tenable Senior Manager of Security Engineering Christopher Edson explains in a blog: “Almost everything in the cloud is one excess privilege or misconfiguration away from exposure.”

If your organization — like most — uses multiple cloud security providers (CSPs), your identity challenges will multiply, as each CSP has its own set of configurations, identity tools and access management structure.

Yet, all CSPs agree on this: In infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service environments, it’s the customer’s responsibility to secure identities. One such example is AWS’s shared responsibility model.

So how do you manage the access permissions of myriad identities across your ever-changing multi-cloud environment? How do you ensure that your identities’ access levels comply with the least-privilege principle and support your zero-trust architecture?

To tackle this challenge, it’s key to have a unified cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) with a strong cloud infrastructure entitlements management (CIEM) solution. With centralized control over all identities, you’ll always know who has access to which cloud resources and what your top permissions risks are.

A unified CNAPP with CIEM can help your organization implement these five best practices for managing and securing your cloud identities.

1 - Obtain end-to-end multi-cloud visibility

You need continuous and detailed visibility into all your cloud identities – both native and federated – as well as into their resource access permissions and security policies. It’s also critical to have a consistent, unified view of identities across all your cloud environments.

Leveraging a CIEM tool that has an interactive dashboard and rich visualization capabilities, you’ll see core identity information at-a-glance, such as:

• the relationships and connections between identities
• their compute, data and network resources
• their security risks, such as excessive access rights and potential vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, anomalies and policy violations

Finally, this process of inventorying and monitoring identities must be continuous, because access to resources and systems in multi-cloud environments shifts constantly. Thus, cloud entitlements must be adjusted frequently and at-scale to align your environment with the principle of least-privilege, such as by eliminating unused identities, fine-tuning access policies and “rightsizing” permissions.

2 - Analyze risks

In addition to full visibility into your identity landscape, you must be able to analyze this identity data and discover policy violations and identity risks, such as inactive users and access credentials that have never been updated.

The analysis needs to be continuous and deep, correlating multiple elements of a human or service identity and surfacing risky scenarios that can allow attackers to escalate privileges, move laterally and swipe sensitive data.

For example, you must be able to detect dangerous combinations, such as:

• Virtual machines with admin privileges that have critical vulnerabilities
• Users with access to sensitive data whose accounts aren’t secured with MFA
• A developer with access to secrets like API keys who starts behaving suspiciously

You should also be able to proactively query and drill down on your unified, multi-cloud identity data to proactively investigate threats, such as unusual data access and login setting changes.

With granular details and enriched context about identity risks from multiple sources, including your CSPs’ activity logs, you’ll be able to assess your identity exposure and prioritize remediation.

3 - Conduct continuous access-compliance monitoring

Keeping your multi-cloud environment in compliance with government regulations, industry mandates and internal policies is increasingly challenging – and identity management is central to your cloud compliance efforts.

That’s why it’s key to have unified access-control governance and compliance, with automated and consistent monitoring, auditing and enforcement of identity security policies — across your multi-cloud environment.

This way, you’ll be able to quickly and consistently detect and address compliance gaps and ensure you’re adhering to policies governing areas such as credential rotation and MFA use.

Plus, you should easily track compliance metrics from a central dashboard, as well as generate reports that document how its cloud identity management processes yield compliance with specific regulations and industry standards.

4 - Automate remediation

The remediation process must be automated so that it can scale and match the dynamic nature of cloud entitlements. For example, tools like guided wizards can walk you through the adjustment of a role’s access rights. Meanwhile, integrations between your CNAPP’s CIEM and your security information and event management (SIEM) and ticketing systems streamline remediation collaboration and reduce remediation time. In addition, you can increase IaC security by deploying snippets that enforce identity policies early in the development cycle.

5 - Deploy just-in-time (JIT) access

Another powerful capability is just-in-time (JIT) access management, which temporarily assigns privileges to identities, such as for the duration of a specific project. When the time-limited period ends, the access is automatically revoked or lowered. JIT is an antidote to the pervasive threat of static, long-lived excessive permissions. JIT also automates the process for users to request temporary entitlement elevations.

Learn how you can take action to boost your cloud security in just five minutes.