Cloud Management
Are there traces of Shadow IT in your Company? The Cloud allows your business to build a virtual datacenter in seconds however, if your organization prioritizes ease of use & the technology admins require users to adhere to a confusing approval process, anyone with internet access and a credit card can easily create another datacenter to get their work done. Why is this a problem? If the shadow accounts aren’t maintained by the IT department, they make you more vulnerable to cyberattacks, data breaches, ransomware exposure & vendor licensing fines.
Monitoring Logging & Alerting
Have thresholds & baselines been set on your monitoring solutions? Have logs been centralized from various cloud resources to perform in-depth analysis & troubleshooting? While alerting & monitoring can help detect infrastructure issues, they can also identify patterns that occasionally exceed cloud budget constraints. Proactive real-time cloud observability can detect underutilized resources, match workloads to capable compute instance types & identify infrastructure bottlenecks while reducing business disruptions.
Infrastructure as Code
If you had to replicate / rebuild your cloud setup how quickly would you be able to do it? How long would it take you to track unauthorized changes if someone deployed a resource without telling you? Combined with a solid GitOps framework, Infrastructure as code resolves these issues by inherently adding cloud governance, compliance & security controls into a CI/CD deployment process. IaC allows you to use automated pipelines as an audit trail so you can scale back privileges from users that could potentially create costly unsanctioned cloud resources.
Hidden Cloud Vulnerabilities
Is MFA enabled on your Cloud accounts? Cloud Admin Interfaces are internet facing API’s which means applying & enforcing Multi-Factor Authentication procedures according to your company policy is CRUCIAL when defending against cloud account takeovers. Access keys that are attached to these accounts can easily be leaked in emails, Instant messages, system config files or source code which can allow attackers to gain access to your cloud resources without having to log into the admin web console.