Assessing Cloud Security Strategies: Reactive, Proactive, or Responsive?

Cloud security market growth shows no signs of slowing down. According to Fortune Business Insights, it is projected to reach $43.74 billion by the end of this year and surpass $63 billion by 2028. As the cloud security market grows, so do the opportunities and attackers’ tactics and techniques, which are becoming increasingly sophisticated, relentless, and fast.

Many organizations now ask themselves the same question: Are we prepared to meet these security challenges head-on, or are we merely reacting to incidents as they arise? Let's explore the distinctions and determine how to best position your organization for future security success.

There are a plethora of different cloud security solutions all vying for attention. Adding to the chaos, many of them have different acronyms and solve all or part of the cloud security problem. From specific solutions like cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs), cloud security posture management (CSPM), and cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) through to all-encompassing cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) — are you confused yet?

In a dynamic market for a dynamic environment, organizations must continuously assess and adapt their cloud security strategies to ensure they're using the right tools and making the right calls. Looking at your existing strategies and processes can simplify those decisions. There are three main elements to consider: reactive security, proactive security, and responsive security.

Reactive security

For some security teams, security strategy is simple: when they find problems in their tech stack, they fix them as fast as possible. This approach involves building and managing effective processes for new issues or vulnerabilities as they are discovered, whether in application components, software container images, or the cloud infrastructure used to host them. This approach is effective at dealing with these problems as they come up, but it presents a potentially stressful environment for their security team.

Relying solely on a reactive security strategy is risky because if your reactions aren’t fast enough — and they’re likely not given that cloud attacks unfold in 10 minutes or less — your organization is dealing with the fallout of a breach. To improve your reactive security processes, you need to use real-time threat detection, implement measures that streamline incident response, and further reduce the time between finding and fixing problems in your tech stack.

To refine these processes, consider using automated tools, fostering strong communication with developers, and conducting regular readiness drills. Even with only a reactive security strategy these enhancements can more effectively mitigate the risks of a dynamic cloud environment.

Proactive security

For security teams that opt to be proactive and solve potential problems in advance, integrating security into the software development process is essential. By embedding security through security-as-code (SaC) and policy-as-code (PaC) rule sets, teams can ensure security is built into the source code from the outset. This enables the security team to implement and maintain a proactive security posture, and it also provides developers with the tools and guidelines needed to create secure-by-design applications and infrastructure.

The goal of a proactive security strategy is to avoid an excessive amount of stress on the security team and — perhaps more importantly — breaches. Another means of enhancing a proactive security posture is monitoring continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines and the images used in these systems. You can often spot potential issues within those environments and remediate them before they go into production.

While a proactive security strategy offers many benefits, relying solely on it can also be risky. Even the most thorough proactive measures can miss unexpected threats or overlooked vulnerabilities as the dynamic cloud and threat landscape change, and 10% of malicious images are missed with pre-production scanning alone.

Responsive security

When looking at reactive and proactive security strategies, it should be clear that both are necessary to properly secure cloud environments and prevent attacks. While you might want to prioritize being proactive, the truth is that new threats and risks will always arise that require a reactive strategy. And though you might have an all-star incident response team, you can always find ways to more effectively use your resources by proactively detecting and suggesting fixes for software vulnerabilities.

What you need is the right mix: reacting as needed and planning ahead wherever possible. Using the 80/20 rule, you might find that you can cover the majority of concerns by being proactive and leaving your teams more time to concentrate on those reactive events that represent the most risk to your organisation in the shortest amount of time.

Start with full visibility of the IT assets running in your cloud environment, including the initial container builds in your repositories or libraries and the production workloads and cloud workloads in your infrastructure. However, even though that level of visibility into your stored images will tell you a great deal, it still won’t tell you exactly what is running in your environment at any given point in time. For a cloud environment, the ideal starting point for a responsive security strategy is runtime security.

Runtime security

Cloud environments are dynamic — developers are constantly making changes to applications and containers in dynamic cloud environments. Containers may drift from their initial, secure builds to versions that contain vulnerabilities. Running software may also call additional resources not captured in the software bill of materials (SBOM), leading to untracked dependencies. Cloud applications consist of various components and services for which security monitoring data must be gathered and is not inherently available.

Runtime security provides crucial insights into what is actively running within your environment, allowing the security team to properly prioritize their proactive security strategy. Our previous research found that 87% of container images have high or critical vulnerabilities, but only 15% of these are tied to loaded packages at runtime. This allows teams to enforce policies on which processes are permitted to run and which accounts are allowed to run certain tasks. Through the use of proactive elements such as continuous real-time monitoring and machine learning, runtime security can anticipate potential threats by identifying anomalies and deviations from baseline behaviors, preempting attacks and strengthening an organization’s proactive security posture.

Our Threat Research Team (TRT) found that, on average, attackers can exploit a cloud environment within ten minutes of gaining initial access. This rapid exploitation underscores the necessity for a reactive security strategy in conjunction with your comprehensive proactive security strategy. Getting ahead of that timeframe is key, and by correlating threat intelligence with runtime vulnerabilities, policy violations, and other information, security teams can quickly detect and respond to threats before they become full-blown incidents.

Getting the right mix

Reactive and proactive security strategies are essential for improving security posture, but they can quickly lead to information silos, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities to be more effective. Incorporating runtime insights into a responsive security strategy bridges the gap between reactive strategies, like incident response, and proactive strategies, like vulnerability management and threat anticipation.

Ultimately, whether you opt for a reactive, proactive, or responsive security strategy, the key is to ensure that it aligns with your organization’s goals, resource limitations, and threat landscape. It’s up to you to position your organization for security success in the dynamic environment of the cloud.