According to the definition, the applications designed and built on the cloud are known as cloud-native apps. However, on a higher level, cloud-native apps are a new approach altogether. It includes the design and development of applications that have cloud capabilities built in them.
In the cloud-native approach, an open-source system leveraging IaaS capabilities (e.g., AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud) creates new tools and services that are more responsive in the age of the customer. From a developer’s perspective, cloud-native means shipping fast and often – without sacrificing reliability.
Typically a cloud-native app is built with the help of microservices or container-based approaches running on Linux. These apps are designed and developed to be as lightweight as possible, focused on a single task, and flexible.
They are considered small building blocks that are brought together to improve productivity, speed, scalability, and efficiency of the system, which is quite challenging to achieve with traditional monolithic architecture.
The Catch in the Technology: Security
Due to a lack of proper visibility over the cloud, a business might find challenges such as security threats, application and network issues, and an inability to deliver against service agreements. As a result, the productivity of the business falls drastically and leads to loss of profit.
The cloud-native apps approach is new and requires constant rendering of the security protocols to ensure the safety of the data and other confidential information.
Moreover, moving to a microservice model, end-to-end visibility, detection, and monitoring becomes more complex and challenging to execute. Secondly, there is currently no solution focused on protecting the entire Linux stack – even though most microservices applications run on Linux.
This implies that the conventional security measurements like an agent’s presence, end-to-end visibility, and a network perimeter might no longer be valid. Many of the security capabilities that we are aware of to date, such as instrumentation of server, may also be ill-suited for the cloud-native environment.
What to Consider to Improve the Cloud Native Application Security?
On the one hand, businesses are experimenting with the benefits of cloud-native apps. The technicalities involved in managing and securing the application environment need a little bit more exposure.
Are the implications of security genuinely different in a cloud-native environment, or they are quite identical to that of the conventional infrastructure? How do the security strategies and controls impact your business? Let’s have a look:
Continuous Delivery Continuous Monitoring
As microservices and containers are replacing the monolithic and traditional apps, software delivery and deployment are being done at a constant rate. Businesses such as Target and Amazon are deploying hundreds of applications in a day.
In such an environment, a continuous security check is quite essential. The security checks must be lightweight, consistent, and embedded into the deployment tools, eliminating the chances of being bypassed.
Server Workload Protection is Top Most Priority
Conventional enterprise security is all about segmenting the network, securing the endpoints, and protecting the perimeter. In a cloud-native infrastructure, you may not be able to rely on network perimeters, gateways, fixed routes, or even the presence of an agent. The server workloads are more exposed to the surface of attack than ever before.
Swift Detection During Run-Time
End-to-end visibility, in a microservices model, monitoring and detection become more complex and challenging to execute, especially during continuous deployment and upgrades. Detection of attacks needs to work dynamically (e.g., less reliance on static signatures), scale in real-time, and do so without jeopardizing the production environment’s performance and stability.
Protection of Hybrid Stack
Various microservices applications run in containers on a virtual machine, while others are on bare-metal Linux. However, today’s security functions protecting the host, the VM layer, the container, and the applications are often different integration. This approach introduces complexity and ambiguities to executing real-time security responses and actions.
