Given the current context, post-covid-19, talking about cloud security with CIEM has become essential. This is because the pandemic motivated the adoption of remote work by most organizations, which resulted in a significant increase in the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure.

As you can imagine, this feature presents particularities when it comes to cybersecurity. To get a sense, Gartner predicts that companies will suffer at least 2,300 violations of privilege policies annually by 2024.

Also according to Gartner, multi-cloud environments introduce a large cyberattack surface that can be exploited by malicious agents. Thus, incorrectly configuring security and identity tools in cloud environments may have violations as a consequence. Therefore, it is not recommended that the settings and maintenance in the access policy be performed manually.

Added to this is the fact that conventional solutions, such as IGA and PAM, may not be efficient to manage this demand. In addition, with infrastructure as a service (IaaS), access management is the responsibility of the client company. According to Gartner, 99% of data breaches occurring in a cloud environment are the responsibility of the customer, not the Cloud Service Provider (CSP).

In this article, we share everything you need to know about cloud security with CIEM. To make our text more understandable, we divided the content by topics. These are:

• History of Cloud Computing

• What Are The Main Challenges of The Companies that Adopt this Service?

• What Is CIEM?

• Why Are CIEM Solutions Important?

• Benefits of a CIEM Solution

• How Can CIEM Be Used?

• How Can CIEM Contribute to DevOps?

• senhasegura CIEM

• Conclusion

Follow our text to the end!

• History of Cloud Computing

In the 1950s, computers were very expensive and companies had access to few machines. For this reason, in the following decade, cloud computing began to be discussed by experts.

The first person to suggest shared use of computers was American computer scientist John McCarthy, who named this concept Utility Computing.

In the following years, Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider studied different ways to use the computer and the Network of Advanced Research Project Agencies (Arpanet), which he helped develop, enabling two or more computers to share data, even in different locations, according to the principles of accessibility and availability. 

But the term “cloud computing” was only used for the first time in the second half of the 1990s, in an academic lecture given by the professor of information systems, Ramnath Chellappa. This expression is based on the symbol of the internet: the cloud. 

Today, we also have the concept of multi-cloud, which consists of the use of various cloud services. These services can be provided by third-party providers or include a private cloud, whose technology is in the organizations’ own data center.

This type of solution enables IT teams to perform individual operations efficiently, while companies reduce costs. 

There is also the hybrid cloud concept, which unites public cloud services with a private cloud, simplifying remote cloud operations and providing more flexibility for businesses. 

However, unlike cloud environment management, which must be managed in isolation, hybrid cloud management needs to be based on a unique strategy. 

• What Are The Main Challenges of The Companies that Adopt this Service?

With the evolution of technology, cloud computing has become accessible, and remote work, adopted by many organizations after the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, has made this resource widely used.

The big issue is that the larger the company, the more people will have access to cloud-based environments. Moreover, many permissions are granted to applications and machines that connect to other applications and databases to exchange information.

Thus, it is necessary to have a strategy that limits unnecessary access and prevents inadequate sharing of information, which can be achieved through CIEM.

• What Is CIEM?

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM) has the function of managing access in cloud and multi-cloud environments. 

This is possible through the access principle of least privilege, which contributes to companies that need to avoid risks such as attacks by malicious users and information leaks, problems generated by excessive permissions on this type of infrastructure.

Thus, a CIEM solution allows you to remove these excessive permissions and centralize the visibility and control of permissions of a cloud environment. 

Through the use of artificial intelligence, a CIEM solution is also able to analyze exposure levels of a company’s cloud environments, enabling the identification and reduction of cybersecurity risks.

. Why Are CIEM Solutions Important?

Using cloud resources is very beneficial for businesses, as it allows them to simplify their operations and save time. 

However, traditional identity and access management (IAM) tools are aimed at protecting static applications and structures rather than cloud infrastructure, which is extremely dynamic.

So, cloud providers have launched their own resources to ensure cybersecurity in this type of environment. Despite this, the dynamism and diversity of cloud environments continue to pose challenges to ensure data protection and compliance with security policies.

After all, it is necessary to keep in mind that when a company uses the cloud to become more efficient, it can increase its attack surfaces with the excess of permissions in that environment. To make things worse, in such cases, it may not have the visibility and control necessary to apply the principle of least privilege. 

In this sense, CIEM solutions are essential to improve visibility, identify and correct incorrect access-related settings with minimal privileges in cloud and multi-cloud infrastructures, and thus ensure the organization’s cybersecurity.

• Benefits of a CIEM Solution

A CIEM solution can generate several benefits for an organization. Check out the main ones below: 

• It allows one to create and maintain an inventory with all permissions in the cloud environment;
• It identifies normal operations in the cloud environment, also detecting abnormal operations;
• This feature allows the identification of external or internal risks, which may be associated with human action, such as errors and disregard for the company’s security policies;
• It points out incorrectly configured permissions, unused privileges, or rights that conflict with corporate policy;
• By making it possible to differentiate the necessary permissions from the excessive ones, it helps to automate the process of excluding improper privileges;
• It detects high priority problems and presents correction plans;
• It reduces the attack surface through the implementation of the principle of least privilege; 
• It enables the implementation of uniform protections across multi-cloud environments; and
• It allows the DevOps team to review all permissions granted to users and machines. 

In the following topic, we approach these benefits from another perspective: by showing how CIEM can be used to ensure more cybersecurity for companies. 

• How Can CIEM Be Used?

Good IT security requires discovering and classifying identities and recognizing permissions granted to people and machines in order to prevent data leaks and breaches. In this sense, CIEM can be used to:

• Ensure that permissions are used appropriately, with separation of roles, which means the person controlling the keys to encrypt data should not have the role of decrypting such data. 

CIEM enables continuous monitoring of identities and permissions, including changes in rights;

• Monitor whether someone has received more permissions than necessary to perform their activities, correcting this problem, which puts organizations at risk;
• Ensure visibility of identities and rights, enabling more efficient management of these permissions. 

• How Can CIEM Contribute to DevOps?

For DevOps teams, managing cloud computing while maintaining information security can be challenging, after all, their priorities are speed and innovation rather than security. 

This is because the services must be launched or provisioned with agility, which ends up causing an excessive granting of permissions. However, the manual blocking of these rights is complex and compromises the fundamental speed for this type of operation. 

With CIEM, one can eliminate excessive permissions automatically, without interrupting developers, who can deploy code quickly and securely. 

• senhasegura CIEM

Check out the advantages of contracting the senhasegura CIEM service below:

• This feature promotes access governance, since it grants visibility to unnecessary privileges, without interrupting or delaying the work of developers;
• It allows organizations to comply with strict privacy policies, such as GDPR, LGPD, and CCPA;
• It contributes to permissions risk management and helps prevent data breaches and theft in cloud environments;
• The management of access keys generated in CSPs, carried out by senhasegura, makes it possible to minimize the attack surface for malicious users and open-source software from third parties;
• This tool also allows adopting the principles of privileged access management (PAM) in cloud environments in order to reduce old and unnecessary permissions;
• Senhasegura CIEM also enables automation in compliance with regulations such as GDPR, SOX, and PCI Data Security Standard.

. Conclusion

By reading this article, you saw that:

• Cloud computing is a technology that began to be required in the 1950s, due to the high cost for companies to have access to computers;
• CIEM is a resource that allows you to manage access in cloud and multi-cloud environments;
• Traditional identity and access management (IAM) means are not suitable for cloud infrastructure, which has great dynamism, so CIEM is necessary in this case;
• A CIEM solution has several advantages, such as reducing the attack surface through the principle of least privilege, thus avoiding data breaches;
• Another great benefit is to enable more visibility and control of identities and rights, detecting excessive permissions and allowing them to be corrected.
• It can also contribute to DevOps, providing security without compromising the speed of releases or provisioning;
• To conclude, you learned about the senhasegura CIEM service, which can make all the difference in the cybersecurity of your company.

Did you like our article on CIEM solutions? Share it with someone who can benefit from this knowledge. 

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DevsecOps is the abbreviation for development, security, and operations and has gained a lot of attention among the best methodologies for software development. According to Gartner, by the end of 2021, DevSecOps practices will be implemented in 60% of agile Development teams, compared to 20% in 2019. DevSecOps practices prioritize cooperation, collaboration, and responsibility-sharing among information security teams.

Privileged access management (Pam), on the other hand, obeys the principle of least privilege, avoiding cyberattacks carried out through privileged credentials, such as breaches and data leaks, and can help achieve DevSecOps throughout software development.

In this article, we cover these concepts and their implications more deeply. To make your understanding easier, our text is divided by topics:

1. About DevSecOps
2. Advantages of the DevSecOps Method
3. About PAM
4. The Importance of PAM to Organizations
5. How PAM can Contribute to DevSecOps
6. Conclusion

• About DevSecOps

DevSecOps is a way to integrate security practices into the DevOps process, which provides launch engineers and security teams working collaboratively through agile software development methodologies.

DevSecOps aims to develop new solutions for complex software development processes in an agile and secure way.

It is a solution to the old security methodologies in the continuous delivery pipeline nowadays, which aims to promote the fast and secure delivery of codes. In this case, silo thinking is replaced by a process that favors communication, cooperation, and sharing of security tasks during the stages of the delivery process.

In DevSecOps, it is possible to bring together two seemingly opposite purposes, secure code and speed of delivery, through a facilitated process.

Aligned with the mechanisms of Agile, security tests, in this case, are performed in iterations, avoiding delaying delivery. In this way, security problems can be solved as soon as they are identified, even before compromising the results.

• Advantages of the DevSecOps Method

In DevSecOps, it is possible to bring together two seemingly opposite purposes, secure code and speed of delivery, through a facilitated process. Thus, one can take advantage of the resources of agile methods and create secure codes.

According to an EMA report released in 2017, the two biggest advantages of security operations are improved operational efficiency in IT, including security, and improved ROI in security infrastructure.

The same study found another important benefit: the possibility of using 100% of cloud services. Other known advantages of DevOps that are inherited by DevSecOps:

• Better communication and collaboration between teams;
• More agile security teams;
• Possibility of responding to demands and changes quickly; and
• More opportunities to perform automated builds and quality testing.

• About PAM

Privileged access management (Pam) has the function of protecting organizations against threats such as theft of credentials and misuse of privileges. 

It consists of an information security strategy that involves users, as well as processes and technology to monitor, protect, control, and audit the privileged activities in the IT structure of a company.

Also known as privileged access security (PAS) and privileged identity management (PIM), PAM considers the principle of least privilege, respected when users receive only the credentials necessary to perform their corporate tasks. 

This cybersecurity practice is of paramount importance for protecting privileged access to valuable data. With it, you can reduce the attack surface and minimize the risk of data breaches.

• The Importance of PAM to Organizations

One of the biggest vulnerabilities for IT structures is human action, including privileged users who go beyond their access level and invaders who appropriate these privileges to operate. 

In this sense, the importance of PAM for organizations is to enable the identification of malicious actions by security teams and ensure employees have only the required access to perform their work, as mentioned in the previous topic. 

Thus, companies that adopt PAM as a cybersecurity mechanism achieve several advantages, such as minimizing security risks, reducing their surface area of cyberattacks, reducing operating costs, and achieving compliance with strict data protection policies, such as the LGPD.

• How PAM Can Contribute to DevSecOps

By reading the previous topics, you can see the importance of PAM for cybersecurity. Here’s how this approach can contribute to DevSecOps throughout the software development cycle:

• PAM makes it possible to scan the secrets spread throughout the DevOps development pipeline, which is essential for companies to understand where information and credentials are being stored, and who is performing each action at which time. This visibility allows one to assess the security of the IT environment.
• It also makes it possible to manage shared secrets and passwords embedded in codes, allowing one to trace actions in the IT environment. This is critical to software integrity and compliance with security policies. 
• The adoption of its concepts involves providing individual users or specific service accounts with the number of privileges needed to perform their tasks. In this way, it is possible to ensure the environment as a whole is not compromised if an account or process is compromised.

• Conclusion

In our article, you learned that:

• DevSecOps integrates security practices into the DevOps process in a collaborative way, which favors communication and responsibility-sharing;
• This approach makes it possible to gather secure codes and delivery speed, through a facilitated process;
• In DevSecOps, security mechanisms are incorporated into the development process;
• PAM aims to protect organizations against threats;
• One of the greatest vulnerabilities for IT structures is human action, which justifies the application of PAM;
• This tool allows the organization to comply with strict data protection policies; and
• PAM contributes to DevSecOps in the software development cycle, allowing one to understand where information and credentials are stored, and who executes (and when). 

Was this content useful for you? Share it with someone else who may also be interested in the topic.

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Secrets like passwords and ssh keys are scattered throughout the software development process. However, few people can access this data. Controlled access is still a major challenge for development teams, due to difficulties in managing this information and adopting non-recommended standards.

The standards that can compromise the security of a system include weak passwords, a topic already addressed here in senhasegura‘s blog.

However, in this article, we will bring more details about the management of secrets in development processes. To facilitate your understanding, we divided our text into the following topics:

1. What Are Secrets?
2. Challenges to Manage Secrets in Development Projects
3. Password Management: Non-Recommended Standards
4. Five Key Practices for Secret Management
5. Conclusion

Follow our text to the end!

• What Are Secrets?

All authentication credentials used in applications and services in an IT structure are considered secrets. This includes passwords, ssh keys, API keys, OAuth tokens, and configuration files.

Secrets management can be viewed as enhanced password management, which includes creating, rotating, revoking, and storing credentials.

After all, the scope in this case is broader, but the purpose remains to protect against unauthorized access to data and systems, data losses, and breaches.

Secrets management contributes to cybersecurity in three instances. They are as follows:

• Infrastructure Security – It prevents users, devices, applications, and other network elements from being invaded;
• Cloud Service Security – It allows you to limit and manage access to cloud-based services;
• Data Security – It makes it possible to protect critical systems, among other resources against data losses and breaches.

Another advantage of secrets management is to help bring organizations into compliance with the requirements of demanding cybersecurity standards, such as FIPS, NIST, and HIPAA.

• Challenges to Manage Secrets in Development Projects

Secrets management involves some difficulties. Next, let’s point out the most common ones. Check it out:

 Lack of Visibility

With the migration of IT infrastructure to the cloud, the number of resources, systems, applications, and accounts changes frequently. As a consequence, the places where secrets are stored also change. 

Therefore, for an organization to remain secure, it is essential to know clearly where this information is stored. What’s more: A lack of visibility can also create obstacles to managing these resources, or when going through an audit.

 Lack of Management Policies 

To meet the criteria of security regulations and facilitate the control of the life cycle phases of a secret, companies must define rules in security policies, which does not always occur. 

 Manual Management

Most organizations do not use automated secret management capabilities to manage their digital credentials yet. In this way, they delay the management process and make the storage of secrets more vulnerable.

• Password Management: Non-Recommended Standards

Many organizations still have non-recommended standards in their password management routine. Here are a few:

 Weak Passwords

Due to the difficulty in memorizing complex passwords, many people adopt simple and easy-to-remember codes. However, this is one of the main vulnerabilities when it comes to password management. After all, easy-to-remember passwords are just as easy to crack.

Also, malicious agents can discover embedded and encoded passwords with the help of verification tools, by performing a brute force attack or simply guessing.

 Password Sharing

Many companies use shared accounts and passwords to manage their systems, making it impossible to identify who performed each action within an online environment in the event of an incident.

In addition, their employees can share passwords with co-workers or others, facilitating the action of attackers interested in sensitive organization data. 

 Storing Secrets in Plain Text

It is common for employees in a company’s department to use text files that contain all passwords for critical situations or forward messages to colleagues with the necessary secrets to access a resource.

Nevertheless, these practices pose risks to the cybersecurity of organizations: attackers only need to obtain a file, message, or email to have tools to hack a system. 

 Reuse of Secrets 

It is also very common to reuse secrets for different services in order to facilitate their memorization and save time. However, if one malicious user discovers one code, the others will also be compromised.

 Unrevoked Secrets 

NIST has as a criterion the revocation of user credentials when necessary. This should occur in the event an employee is fired or a contract with a third-party supplier is terminated, for example. However, this security procedure is not followed by all organizations.

 Secrets Without Rotation

Various security standards dictate that passwords be changed within a given time frame, as do application keys and other types of secrets. Once again, it is not all companies that follow this recommendation. 

Five Key Practices for Secret Management

There are several ways to provide a secure method for protecting secrets. The following are five important steps to achieve this goal:

 Centralized Secrets Management

First, you should centralize your secrets in one place to ensure more security and facilitate their management. This makes it easier to build governance, security, and auditing to know who accesses this information and when it is accessed. 

 ACLs (Access Control Lists)

Once you have your secrets centralized in one place, make sure the right people have access to them. To do this, you can create human, machine, and application ACLs that give you control of that access. 

 Temporary Credentials

The third and fourth actions must occur simultaneously: they consist of having dynamic secrets. In practice, to ensure dynamic secrets, individuals and entities must be given temporary credentials to access the systems. 

Encryption

As mentioned, it is important that data in transit or at rest can be encrypted, with encryption keys centralized in secrets management.

 Audit

Now, you might be wondering how to audit your secrets management and know what was accessed by which user. 

Each dynamic secret can be used by a single user, who is properly authenticated when retrieving this information, and encryption as a service allows you to know who accessed an encryption and decryption operation. All of this can give you a complete picture of everything that happens in your IT infrastructure.

Conclusion

• By reading this article you have learned what secrets are, how they should be managed, and what are the biggest challenges in managing this information. You were also able to understand which standards are not recommended in password management, such as:

• Weak Passwords;
• Password Sharing;
• Storing Secrets in Plain Text;
• Reuse of Secrets;
• Unrevoked Secrets; and
• Secrets Without Rotation.

In addition, we presented five fundamental practices for good secrets management. 

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