Gartner has predicted that, through 2025, preventable misconfigurations and end-user mistakes will cause more than 99% of cloud breaches.
“Detecting misconfigurations” is typically a well-defined process, fully equipped with technologies in the CNAPP and CSPM space or cloud-native security services. But looks can be deceiving, and the entire “remediation process” is often more complex and time-consuming than cloud security teams initially anticipate. What makes it even more challenging is a frequently overlooked concept called “remediation anxiety.” As a SecOps leader, it’s key to understand the risks and impact of remediation anxiety, and how your teams can overcome it by leveraging four key steps.
Remediation Anxiety and the Impact
Remediation anxiety is a phenomenon often described as a gap between cloud security and developers. While cloud security teams are typically tasked with identifying security issues, they rely on developers and DevOps teams to fix issues as they arise. It may seem like the remediation process is clear and seamless, but remediation involves extra risks and costs often overlooked while detecting security issues. By attempting to fix the misconfiguration, one can break the working production environment, or significantly increase cloud costs.
How to Alleviate Resistance
Remediation begins with establishing a detection process using cloud-native tools or third-party CNAPP/CSPM/CWPP solutions. In order to reduce the risk created by the issues these tools detect, you must also establish, and follow, a robust remediation process. A consistent process enables your security and development teams to continuously reduce risk by remediating existing issues and preventing similar misconfigurations from occurring in the future. You can sleep better at night knowing paramount risks, such as the loss of customer trust and negative financial impact, will be minimized.
To effectively address security issues within the cloud and allay remediation anxiety, your teams should consider these four key steps to form the basis of a sound remediation process:
1. Prioritize and Conduct Ongoing Assessments
The initial phase of addressing cloud security issues, after detection, is prioritization or triage. This step can be based on several criteria, including the AI-driven environmental triage of an alert that includes data classification, security team internal priorities, crown jewel analysis, and asset ownership attribution.
2. Analyze Remediation Impact
Once you’ve identified and assessed security issues, it’s time to develop a comprehensive remediation plan. A critical step here is to conduct a thorough remediation impact analysis to determine “what will go wrong if I fix this.” Documenting your plan during this step also aids in communicating what needs to occur across security, dev, and ops team members. This phase plays a critical role in ensuring that your remediation efforts are effective.
3. Execute and Remediate
The execution phase is where your plan comes to life. You follow the steps, responsibilities, and timeline outlined in your plan. Integrating security into your Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CICD) pipeline helps to catch vulnerabilities early. Leveraging automation during this step plays a significant role in streamlining tasks, ensuring consistency, and expediting the remediation process.
4. Proactively Prevent Risks
While remediation is vital, proactive prevention is equally crucial to reduce the risk of future security incidents. If team members are consistently deploying the same misconfiguration, the issue you just resolved will crop up again. Establishing an ongoing prevention process, leveraging cloud-native security controls and features, and using automation playbooks for prevention and monitoring are essential components of this step.
What’s Next?
Now you know the steps to a successful remediation process – prioritization, impact analysis, execution, and prevention. By following these steps, your cloud security teams can bolster their cloud security posture, protect critical assets, and adapt to evolving threats. Furthermore, integrating security into organizational culture is vital for long-term success in maintaining a secure cloud environment. Stay vigilant, proactive, and committed to continuously improving your cloud security practices.
Further reading
- Check out our whitepaper on the ROI impact of cloud remediation
- Read our case study to learn how Tamnoon turned 12,000+ CNAPP alerts into actionable tasks
- Explore our AWS integration
