Cloud solutions are built for speed, scale, and ease of use, which presents a dilemma for your cloud security team. Left unchecked, you can quickly deploy complex assets to production and greatly increase your Cyber Exposure in the process. Your security team needs continuous visibility into your cloud workload deployments, which can happen multiple times a day.
Cloud Security: Five Steps to Effective Risk-Based Vulnerability Management Success
Discover, assess, prioritize, remediate and measure every asset across your cloud environments to strengthen the foundation of your cloud security program.
Effective risk-based vulnerability management for cloud security requires a strong process, mapping directly to these five phases of the Cyber Exposure lifecycle:
1. Discover
Discover
Complete visibility into ephemeral assets in near real time
Use Tenable cloud connectors for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure to enable near real-time detection of new short-lived compute asset deployments across your multicloud environments. Keep up with your cloud-native technologies such as auto-scaling, on-demand instances and container deployments.
Detect assets in development
Discover new assets early in the software development lifecycle and identify vulnerabilities before production. Early detection in CI/CD tools and registries eliminate blind spots in your assets deployed in large groups for short periods of time.
Optimize assessment costs
Run free asset discovery scans of your entire cloud infrastructure and itemize your environment to root out unknown assets. Automatically reallocate your asset licenses 24 hours after a cloud instance terminates.
Netskope has live discovery of every asset, providing dynamic and holistic visibility across the modern attack surface (cloud, data center, IoT, etc.). This includes automating asset discovery, particularly assets in their cloud infrastructure, including containers.Netskope Read the Case Study
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Accurately identify, investigate and prioritize vulnerabilities.
2. Assess
Assess
Traditional vulnerability management scanning tools lack the flexibility of multiple data collection sensors, leaving your cloud security team blind to vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and malware in your cloud-native assets.
Harden cloud infrastructure based on best practices
Minimize your attack surface by auditing your cloud environment based on established cloud security best practices from CIS and the most popular cloud providers.
Assess your entire cloud attack surface
Detect and surface vulnerabilities in your entire cloud stack—from the host to the workload—all from one central hub.
Deploy multiple sensor types for complete visibility
Powered by Nessus, the world’s most trusted vulnerability scanner with more than 136,000 vulnerability detection plugins, you can choose from active scanning, agents, passive monitoring and image assessments to best suit the variety of services your organization manages in the cloud.
Tenable.io provides us with a unified view of the state of all of our assets. We use it to run compliance scans in addition to system and network vulnerability scans across all our assets every night.Francis Pereira, Head of Infrastructure, CleverTap Check Out the Video Case Study
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Accurately identify, investigate and prioritize vulnerabilities.
3. Prioritize
Prioritize
Threat actors routinely change their tactics and static CVSS scores can’t keep up with dynamic threats, especially in a constantly changing cloud environment. Use a risk-based approach for vulnerability analysis to quickly identify the top 3% of vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk to your organization. With Predictive Prioritization and tailored dashboards, you’ll get clear remediation information, which you can pass to the right teams at the right time to decrease risk to your organization.
Identify cloud vulnerabilities that require immediate attention
Prioritize vulnerabilities based on a combination of threat intelligence, exploit availability and vulnerability metadata. Predictive Prioritization is as dynamic as your cloud environment and facilitates allocation of remediation resources to your most pressing vulnerabilities.
Share vulnerability priority information with your DevOps teams
Create tailored dashboards and reports to easily communicate vulnerability priority to DevOps and other teams across your organization, so they know what to fix first.
Automatically send info to SIEM
Automatically send vulnerability and misconfiguration data to your SIEM to provide event context and identify potential areas for response automation.
We now have unmatched visibility into the security posture of our CI/CD pipeline and running containers, allowing us to focus on what matters most: saving lives.Gareth Beaumont, Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer, Volpara Health Read the Case Study
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Accurately identify, investigate and prioritize vulnerabilities.
4. Remediate
Remediate
Discovering and prioritizing vulnerabilities in a cloud environment is only half the battle. Your organization needs to shift left with cloud security to find and remediate vulnerabilities before they reach production.
Patch once and apply always
Prevent vulnerabilities before they reach production by creating secure machine and container images before deployment.
Shift left with cloud security testing
Integrate risk-based vulnerability management into your CI/CD systems, such as Jenkins, Bamboo and TeamCity. Automate your cloud security testing to assess each new image built as part of your quality assurance process.
Integrate with bug-tracking and remediation management tools through powerful APIs
Assign owners to vulnerabilities through ServiceNow and track prioritized vulnerabilities through closure with Jira bug-tracking tools. Open and well-documented APIs make it easy to seamlessly integrate into your DevOps processes.
We selected Tenable for its ease of use, automation capabilities, expertise and brand recognition. The ability to automatically assess each new container image and to continuously protect the image as new vulnerabilities are discovered is invaluable.Gareth Beaumont, Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer, Volpara Health Read the Case Study
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Accurately identify, investigate and prioritize vulnerabilities.
5. Measure
Measure
Measuring Cyber Exposure across your entire attack surface is challenging. It requires discovery of all of your assets, assessments, mapping assets to a specific business service, determining which ones are business-critical, and then factoring in vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and other security weaknesses—for every asset. These steps help you prioritize risk and facilitate information-sharing back to your technical teams and key stakeholders.
Calculate and communicate Cyber Exposure
Leverage advanced analysis and risk-based exposure scoring to weigh asset value and criticality, vulnerabilities and their context. This provides you with all the data required to provide powerful tailored visualizations of your entire attack surface so anyone—from analyst to executive—can quickly understand your organization’s Cyber Exposure.
Benchmark performance
Compare your Cyber Exposure Score to other business units and to similar external peer organizations.
Demonstrate cloud security through data
Dispel the notion that cloud environments are inherently less secure by comparing Cyber Exposure Scores (CES) and progress over time to on-prem assets. Clear metrics and powerful dashboards illustrate how the cloud-native ability to shift left with remediation and create reusable golden images makes cloud environments perfectly suited for your business-critical applications and workloads.
Metrics are an important part of information security, and being able to speak the language of executives and to be able to present information in the appropriate fashion. Tenable does a really nice job of helping me do that.Matthew Stewart, Senior Manager, IT Security, American Eagle Outfitters Check Out the Video Case Study
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Accurately identify, investigate and prioritize vulnerabilities.