Cloud infrastructure is subject to a wide variety of international, federal, state and local security regulations. Organizations must comply with these regulations or face the consequences. 

Due to the dynamic nature of cloud environments, maintaining consistent compliance for regulatory standards such as CIS, NIST, PCI DSS and SOC 2 benchmarks can be difficult, especially for highly regulated industries running hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructures. Challenges vary by industry but often include cloud complexity, data residency, time-consuming audits and keeping up with new regulations. 

Read: “What is Cloud Compliance? A Starter Guide for Security Professionals”

Many organizations are uncertain about their cloud compliance obligations — and who is responsible for them. Cloud security tools such as cloud security posture management (CSPM) and cloud workload protection (CWP) can help organizations meet compliance benchmarks while providing advanced protection against cyberattacks. 

Monitoring your cloud deployments against compliance frameworks provides a base level of controls and best practices. However, these deployments must also be layered with advanced protection. With cloud breaches rampant, this advanced protection is critical, as adversaries continue to evolve their techniques faster than compliance regulations can be updated. 

CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security covers the four major security compliance frameworks, including MITRE ATT&CK®, CIS, NIS and ISO, as well as industry-specific requirements, including GDPR and PCI-DSS for financial services and payments, FedRAMP and FISMA for government, and HIPAA and HITECH for healthcare. 

With Falcon Cloud Security, you can identify risks and security gaps, address misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, and enforce gold-standard policies to meet industry regulations while securing your business in the cloud. 

Here’s the story of how one organization did just that. 

Going Beyond Compliance: Commercial Bank of California

As a bank built for the speed and scale of modern business, Commercial Bank of California (CBC) runs a number of web applications and APIs hosted in AWS and Microsoft Azure. In addition to adhering to federal and state regulations, PCI security standards and NACHA, CBC implements CIS benchmarks to harden its cloud environments. 

Before adopting Falcon Cloud Security, CBC had to manually identify gaps and track remediation. With CrowdStrike, the bank can automatically detect misconfigurations in near real-time and filter them by MITRE ATT&CK and compliance guidelines. Falcon Cloud Security also sorts by severity rating, allowing CBC to prioritize remediation based on risks. 

“We care about our clients’ data and the funds they entrust us to hold. We needed a solution that could both monitor and harden our multi-cloud environment so we can avoid any data loss or potential compromise,” said Kevin Tsuei, SVP Information Security Officer at CBC. “Falcon Cloud Security has been a time-saving resource for us and a valuable tool to enhance our security posture.”

CBC learned it could easily deploy Falcon Cloud Security to protect its cloud environments using the same lightweight CrowdStrike Falcon® sensor it uses to protect its endpoints and other attack surfaces. With Falcon Cloud Security, CBC can go beyond compliance to secure its business in the cloud.

“Falcon Cloud Security helped us harden our cloud environments. We can now quickly identify and fix cloud misconfigurations, secure our containers and protect our Linux servers in both AWS and Azure,” said Tsuei. “With CrowdStrike, we can remediate any cloud intrusion in less than 16 minutes, which puts our minds at ease.”

Making Cloud Compliance Easier

Cloud compliance starts with a robust, well-defined security posture that provides visibility and control with a granular view of infrastructure and workflow traffic. While all cloud security solutions help with compliance to some degree, CrowdStrike delivers comprehensive cloud detection and response, enabling a robust security posture and compliance specific to different industries and regulations. 

CrowdStrike can help you attain compliance for your cloud environment so you can focus on innovating your business. Falcon Cloud Security offers:

• Unified compliance visibility. Use the compliance dashboard, framework details and drill-down capabilities for simple and consistent compliance auditing and reporting.
  
• Compliance management. Enforce compliance of industry regulations and security benchmarks with automated compliance features and customized policies.
  
• Simplified reporting. View and export results of assessments mapped to a benchmark or framework requirement. You can also export scheduled or on-demand reports of your compliance posture and non-compliant assets.
  
• Remediation. Get remediation steps, alert logic and MITRE ATT&CK information for each policy. Links to related compliance information are available for quick reference throughout the user interface.

CrowdStrike achieved 100% protection, 100% visibility and 100% analytic detection coverage in the MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK® Evaluations: Enterprise Round 5. Our cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) capabilities offer both pre-runtime container image scanning and runtime protection — providing complete protection against cloud breaches.

Watch this short video to see how Falcon Cloud Security makes it easier for organizations to enforce cloud compliance:

Delivered from the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon Platform

A strong cloud security solution helps you enforce compliance throughout your security operations, while also providing a unified approach to threat prevention, visibility and security posture management to stop breaches.

While some cloud security vendors offer pieces of security, compliance and governance of policies, CrowdStrike goes above and beyond to offer unified security and compliance across the entire infrastructure, from on-premises to the cloud, in a single console and single interface as part of the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon platform.

The result is an industry-leading cloud security solution that allows organizations to enforce cloud compliance while delivering the strongest protection against breaches.

Additional Resources

• Request a free cloud security risk review. 
• Learn more about how Falcon Cloud Security can help you with cloud compliance.
• Read the Commercial Bank of California case study.