What is Cloud Network Security?

Cloud network security describes the technology, policies, controls, and processes used to protect public, private, and hybrid cloud networks from unauthorized access, exposure, modification, or misuse. Network security is a foundational component of a multi-layer cybersecurity strategy used to prevent breaches, malware, and other cyber-attacks on cloud users and resources. Keep reading to learn how cloud network security works and best practices to secure storage, VMs, APIs and workstreams.

How does cloud network security work?

Cloud network security combines multiple layers of defense between edge devices and network infrastructure to protect data and the people who use it. It works within software-defined networks (SDN) to inspect packets and route traffic enforcing an organization’s pre-defined rules and security policies. Each security layer, or key capability, uses packet analysis to apply policies and controls to protect cloud deployments and their digital assets. Cloud firewalls and gateways work similar to data center ones by inspecting network packets in near real-time without impacting application performance. Authorized users are allowed secure access to assigned network resources, but malicious actors are blocked, preventing attacks and data loss.

Cloud network security provides operational simplicity through API and other software integration techniques across multiple vendor platforms and virtualization solutions. They easily deploy scalable firewalls and virtual gateways to achieve enterprise-wide control required to perform network segmentation, monitoring, and threat prevention for dynamic network traffic patterns in a single pane of glass. Additionally, these solutions include various features to enhance overall security. Cloud gateways and firewalls are similar in function and capability to on-premises devices of the same name, often running the exact same software but in cloud vendor infrastructure VMs (virtual machines). Premium security services are engineered to auto-scale with gateway load balancers, virtual WAN (wide area networks), and other cloud infrastructures to ensure cost-efficient delivery of resources.

What are the common threats to cloud networks?

Cloud computing consists of a Front Door that faces the internet; where customers, partners prospects, and third-party SaaS applications interact with cloud assets. This entry point is a high-traffic area, exposing the cloud instance to a wide range of AI-based external threats from across the world. Common Front Door attack vectors include exploiting software weaknesses, such as the OWASP Top 10, known and unknown OSS security vulnerabilities, DDoS attacks, insecure APIs, and unauthorized access from misconfigured security settings.

Your cloud security strategy should also include advanced threat prevention and integration with WAF (Web Application Firewall) technology to protect sensitive data. This adds a crucial layer, protecting APIs and stopping attacks like cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and other application-layer threats before they reach cloud assets. The WAF inspects incoming requests and blocks any malicious attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in the application code base.

Cloud network security key capabilities

Network security is a critical layer of defense for cloud deployments, especially for smaller businesses where it may be the only layer. Since cloud providers deploy a shared responsibility model, customers of all sizes must protect their own data and understand the security risk. So, cloud network security should protect against all known and unknown threats requiring a wide range of capabilities, including:

• AI-powered threat prevention: To stay ahead of AI-enabled attackers, you need advanced machine learning-based zero-day, anti-phishing, and DNS security capabilities. As cybercriminals leverage AI so must security vendors build and train their own proprietary AI inference engines. A high-quality cloud security vendor should be transparent about how many network traffic analysis engines or machine learning pipelines they employ in their solution.

• Unified Management: Cloud adoption expands the corporate digital attack surface and increases the complexity of security. Cloud security services should offer integration with an organization’s existing on-premises networks to maximize operational efficiency. Ideally, security teams should be able to manage all cloud and on-premises networks from a single management console or single-pane-of-glass.

• SSL/TLS Traffic Inspection: Network traffic is often encrypted, making it challenging to detect and block malicious connections. Network security services need to provide fast SSL/TLS traffic inspection with minimal latency.

• Network Segmentation: Enables network macro-segmentation and micro-segmentation in cloud environments. This “fences off” network subnets from one another reducing the potential threat blast radius if something does happen and stopping lateral movement by an attacker if a breach occurs.

• Automation: Cloud application infrastructure, often container-based, can be ephemeral and highly dynamic supporting fluctuating demand. A cloud network security service must be responsive to support cloud native network scaling and application load balancing. As cloud infrastructure grows and expands, automation is essential to scalability and rapid threat response. Automated cloud network security services support rapid deployment, solution agility, and CI/CD workflow automation.

• Access Control: Governs access to the network, ensuring that only authorized devices gain entry. Cloud network security policies are enforced by cloud firewall and gateway rules. Access control capabilities allow an organization to gain visibility to cloud network traffic sources and destinations and also limit network access to guests, contractors, and block completely unauthorized or risky devices.

• Adaptive Policies: Adaptive policies allow security administrators to define network rules based on tags automating access control. When an access rule is based on an object’s tags, we do not rely on network access rules based on static IP addresses or limited CIDR block ranges. The cloud network security service or controller should continually scan the cloud network for changes. So, if a company adds a new cloud server and tags it correctly, the cloud network security service will automatically assign the correct network access rights for that specific tag group, ideally within seconds. No human intervention should be required. This simplifies security operations and reduces mundane, error-prone administration tasks.

• Third-Party Integrations: Cloud network security operates within a cloud provider environment alongside their existing tools and solutions. Integration with third-party solutions helps to optimize configuration management, network monitoring, and lowers costs through security automation.

• Cloud VPNs: Cloud VPNs (virtual private networks) allow organizations to securely scale access to their cloud-based resources from a home or public Wi-Fi network, enabling employees, partners, and customers to safely use critical cloud resources regardless of location.

• Content Sanitization: Rather than completely blocking potentially malicious content, high quality cloud network security services should be able to remove malicious, executable content and provide users with access to sanitized content.

• Firewalls: Monitors, filters, and controls incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predefined security rules. Acting as a barrier between trusted internal and untrusted external networks, it works by inspecting data packets and choosing to block or allow them. For example, a bank might configure its firewall to block traffic coming from a certain country while still allowing legitimate traffic to pass through. This mitigates potential threats without risking business continuity.

• Gateways and Next-Generation Firewalls ( NGFW ): Incorporate deep packet inspection to enable additional analysis of payload information and identification of threats like malicious URL or DNS addresses. Security vendors often package many essential network security capabilities into one comprehensive offering, including intrusion prevention, antivirus and file sandboxing, URL and DNS filtering.

• Intrusion Prevention Systems ( IPS ): Detect and block known and unknown threats before they can impact the network core or edge devices. In addition to north/south (internet to network) and east/west (within or between networks) deep packet inspection, including inspection of encrypted traffic, they can also provide virtual patching, which mitigates vulnerabilities at the network level.

• DNS and URL filtering: As part of a data loss prevention strategy,  Domain Name System (DNS) filtering stops domain-based attacks, such as DNS hijacking, and tunneling. URL filtering prevents users and applications from accessing suspicious URLs linked to malicious sites or cybercriminal activity.

• Antivirus and Sandboxing: Antivirus and sandboxing tools are key to determining whether a file is malicious. While antivirus blocks known malware threats, sandboxing provides a safe environment to analyze suspicious files. When a user downloads an email attachment the antivirus scans it for known attack signatures and behaviors. If a threat is found the software quarantines or deletes the file. For an unknown file, sandboxing isolates it into a protected space where it can be tested to see if it’s malicious and block it if necessary.

Benefits of cloud network security

Key benefits of cloud network security include:

• Consistent policy enforcement: Easily enforce consistent corporate and security policies across on premises, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. A cloud security solution integrated with existing on-premises solutions enables more consistent security controls and threat monitoring.

• Centralized security orchestration and automation: Allows security teams to quickly identify and respond to potential threats to on premises and cloud-based infrastructure, critically important when security is a shared responsibility with vendors.

• Clear security visibility: On premises and cloud security monitoring and management is delivered from a unified management interface. This simplifies threat prevention, security monitoring, reporting, forensics, and remediation for cloud environments while reducing risk and SecOps costs.

• Reduced risk from attacks and ransomware: Strong, robust security measures and deep packet inspection coupled with AI-powered threat analysis can ensure your data stays protected, and you won’t be paying ransom to get it back.

• Enhanced compliance and data privacy: Proactively eliminating threats ensures sensitive and personable identifiable information (PII) is shielded from unauthorized access while traversing networks.

• Improved business continuity: Protected networks are more resilient against potential disruptions and experience minimal downtime, leading to optimal revenue generation and customer satisfaction levels.

• Better network and application performance: Network security prevents bad actors from disabling the network ensuring resources are running optimally and safe from cyberattacks.

Challenges of cloud network security

While data center and cloud networks can face the same cybersecurity risks, IT teams have less control and visibility over cloud networks, especially in hybrid environments. This makes it challenging to have a complete view of hybrid cloud or multi-cloud attack surfaces to identify security incidents, block threats, review logs, and facilitate remediation. While legacy and cloud network security solutions offer major benefits, they are not without challenges and limitations. Some of the key issues include:

Accuracy – Reduction of False Positives

While preventing breaches or unauthorized access is a priority, so is allowing authorized access. False positives are common in many cloud network security solutions. False positives create lack of confidence and IT teams will ignore them and eventually shut off the security service wasting the investment and putting the organization back at risk.

Human Error

Cloud services often come with complex settings. Humans and even experienced security engineers can make mistakes, so misconfigurations are a common reason that cloud environments are exposed to security risk from attackers. A simple one-character typo in a firewall rule or improperly configured storage bucket can leave sensitive information and critical data needlessly exposed to the internet where cybercriminals can find it in seconds.

Increasing outsider and Insider threats

With cyberattacks on the rise from outside and inside the network, it’s important to have a comprehensive, preventative security strategy that includes ongoing employee cybersecurity education to help drive awareness to all threats.

Affordability

AI-powered network security solutions can be expensive, especially when run in the cloud and charged by the CPU or GPU minute. AI-powered cloud network security platforms are best delivered as a completely managed service to take the burden of running them away from organizations.

Cloud network security best practices

Establishing cloud network security best practices are essential for protecting cloud-based resources and ensuring a secure environment. There are many strategies and tools you can deploy but you can optimize your approach by starting with these cloud network security best practices:

• Trust but verify.  Employ Zero Trust network access, meaning limiting access to the least amount of network privilege required reducing risk of malicious or inadvertent network access to cloud resources.

• Practice consistent access management practices to control who can access cloud network resources. Use the principle of least privilege to ensure administrators, users, customers, and applications have the minimum level of network access necessary. Also apply role-based access control (RBAC) to limit access based on business and application user roles.

• Macro and Microsegment  your network to control who can access cloud resources. Segment by business function like HR, Finance, Sales, etc. Segmented networks enable least privileged access across network segment boundaries. Critical applications with PII data should be on their own network segment. This is a key component of a zero-trust security policy. Zero-trust security means no packet is trusted by default, whether generated from inside or outside of your network. Zero trust allows you to increase access control from the network perimeter to individual subnets, users and devices.

• Encrypt data  in flight and at rest . Enforce Transport Layer Security (TLS) for data in transit and use an enterprise encryption key manager to efficiently store on premises and cloud data at rest.

• Perform network penetration tests and continuously assess your cloud environment for vulnerabilities through regular scanning and penetration testing to identify and remediate weaknesses.

Current cloud network security trends

Trends

The following list are some of the top trends in cloud network security.

Using collaborative AI across all threat landscapes to stay one step ahead of known and unknown threats. This requires cloud network security, code security, web application firewalls (WAF) and Cloud Native Application Protection (CNAPP) working together to protect all networks, resources, and applications.

CPU and GPU integration  to support complex hybrid mesh and multi-cloud network security operations. Applications that require high performance benefit from network security delivered through integration with CPU and GPU vendors like Nvidia. This enables faster threat detection and remediation that is required for securing dynamic multi-cloud network environments and enforcing massive sets of rules and complex policies.

Automation is making cybersecurity less costly. Adaptive or smart network policies scan the network for changes and automatically apply rules without human intervention. Integrated firewalls can automatically deploy as network load changes.

Managed services are growing in popularity as they shift some of the management tasks and risk from managing network security to third-party vendors or cloud service providers (CSPs). They are paid to manage and secure an organization’s cloud infrastructure and network. These services help organizations safeguard their cloud environments by implementing security measures, monitoring threats, and ensuring compliance, without requiring them to handle all the complexities of security management in-house or hiring and managing a team of highly skilled, multi-cloud network security engineers.

Implementing Cloud Network Security In Your Organization

By harnessing the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence, organizations streamline their cloud network security operations, improve productivity, and enhance user experiences. Always running, automatically analyzing cloud networks for changes and auto-enforcing policies, Check Point provides the most intelligent AI-powered threat prevention with a highly accurate 99.8% catch rate.

Engineered specifically for hybrid mesh and cloud virtual wide area networks (WANs)