The adoption of the cloud has fundamentally changed the game when it comes to how businesses go to market and develop modern applications. Today’s application lifecycle places a premium on speed to market, requiring cloud teams to build cloud-native applications supported by a programmable infrastructure that enables businesses to change and reconfigure cloud infrastructure on the fly. According to industry analysts, most successful attacks on cloud services are the result of customer misconfiguration, mismanagement and mistakes. Any one of these can result in exposing systems and critical data, leaving many asking themselves, “How can I prevent this?”

As businesses continue to adopt more and more cloud-native tools, security teams are finding it difficult to keep up. The result is poor visibility and control of cloud resources, fragmented approaches to detecting and preventing misconfigurations, and the inability to maintain compliance, ultimately leading to increased risk to the business. To meet these challenges head on, many security teams partnering with DevOps are turning to cloud security posture management (CSPM) solutions such as CrowdStrike ^® Falcon Horizon to help solve this problem, with the intended goal of reducing the possibility of a data breach and minimizing the damage in the event of an attack on the cloud estate.

Falcon Horizon Meets Cloud Challenges Head On

When it comes to why misconfigurations occur, there are four common reasons that seem to boil up to the top.

1. Cloud sprawl: With the cloud comes new technologies, new possibilities and new risks. Multi-cloud environments open the door for capabilities such as microservices and new technologies such as containers, serverless functions and Kubernetes. The result is a growth in resources needing to be managed that extends beyond the traditional data center resources.
2. Programmable infrastructure: The API-driven approach of the cloud enables tremendous flexibility to DevOps teams. But the idea that infrastructure-as-code (IaC) — or the programmable nature of IaC — makes it easy to craft infrastructure changes on the fly can also make it just as easy to introduce mistakes and misconfigurations that leave the environment vulnerable.
3. Traditional security doesn’t work in the cloud: The approach of treating the security of the cloud the same way you do for your data center introduces many challenges. Identity access management (IAM), key management, storage and a host of other factors introduce new threat vectors that cannot be detected with traditional security tools. Add to that the lingering skills gap problem with both security and the cloud and you have a double whammy.
4. You can’t protect what you can’t see: Visibility into hundreds of thousands of instances and accounts is a daunting task for any business and security team. The problem is compounded when you look at the size and complexity of many environments, making it nearly impossible to know what is running where. This lack of visibility results in misconfigurations going undetected for days, weeks or longer.

Why Falcon Horizon

The purpose of a CSPM solution such as Falcon Horizon is to continuously monitor cloud risk through the prevention, detection, response and prediction of where excessive cloud infrastructure risk resides based on common frameworks, regulatory requirements and enterprise policies. By extending these solutions directly into the development process, security teams are able to proactively identify and remediate cloud risks prior to production, and it is estimated that businesses that choose this path can reduce cloud-related security incidents due to misconfigurations by as much as 80%.

The benefits of Falcon Horizon include:

• Providing unified visibility across multi-cloud environments
• Preventing misconfigurations and accelerating time-to-value
• Reducing alert fatigue and improving SOC productivity
• Meeting and maintaining compliance in the cloud
• Uncovering hidden threats
• Reducing time to remediate
• Augmenting skills and expertise

In this world of modern infrastructure, security teams need modern cloud security — security that goes beyond the typical ad hoc approach and is an integral part of the application development process rather than one that is bolted on after the fact. To learn more about how CrowdStrike  Falcon Horizon can help you gain visibility, continuously monitor threats and ensure compliance in the cloud, enabling DevOps to deploy applications with greater speed and efficiency, visit crowdstrike.com.

Additional Resources

• Read the press release on CrowdStrike Falcon® Horizon.
• Learn more about CrowdStrike Falcon® Horizon, CrowdStrike’s CSPM solution.
• Find out how the powerful CrowdStrike Falcon®® platform unifies the technologies, intelligence and expertise required to stop breaches. 
• Get a full-featured free trial of CrowdStrike Falcon® Prevent™ and learn how true next-gen AV performs against today’s most sophisticated threats.