Strengthening Cloud Security

In today’s landscape, where organizations are increasingly embracing the power of cloud-native technologies, the need for comprehensive cloud security has never been more paramount. As CISOs and IT operations teams grapple with the evolving threat landscape, a critical divide has emerged between cloud infrastructure posture management and runtime security.

Imagine your organization’s cloud environment as a house you’re responsible for securing. The “posture management” aspect would be akin to conducting a thorough inspection of the perimeter — checking for unlocked doors, vulnerabilities in the infrastructure, and ensuring only authorized individuals have access. This provides you with a solid understanding of the potential security risks.

However, the “runtime security” component is like having security cameras and alarms within the house, capable of detecting and alerting you to actual intruders in real time. This is where the challenge lies — many cloud security solutions focus heavily on one aspect, leaving a concerning blind spot in the other.

On the one hand, posture management security systems deliver snapshots of data on potential external vulnerabilities, such as infrastructure misconfigurations, identity and access management issues, and infrastructure as code (IaC) Issues. Yet, they often lack the crucial runtime information needed to prioritize the most pressing, production-relevant risks. Conversely, runtime security solutions may generate alerts on suspicious activity and unauthorized containers but frequently fail to provide the necessary context to trace, verify, and resolve the root cause of an exposure.

This divide is especially problematic in the increasingly pervasive containerized cloud-native environments. In these dynamic infrastructures, thousands of runtime containers and container images can easily harbor misconfigurations and vulnerabilities that are difficult to identify and address. And, as the responsibility for security has shifted between development and security teams, a dangerous visibility blind spot has emerged, driving increased risk across the organization.

This gap not only needs to be exposed, but the relevant contextual information must be made available to all teams — security, operations, and development. Without this end-to-end visibility and collaboration, teams are left struggling to prioritize and resolve the most critical threats and exposures. Threats that may be flagged by runtime security systems often lack the necessary details to trace their root causes back to misconfigurations or vulnerabilities in the underlying container images.

Bridging this divide is essential for organizations to confidently embrace the agility and scalability of cloud-native technologies without compromising their overall security posture. Failure to do so leaves the door open for damaging security incidents, which studies show have impacted over 80% of companies using the cloud in recent years.

Tanium Cloud Workloads

Tanium’s Cloud Workloads functionality offers a unified approach to bridge this gap, empowering CISOs and IT operations teams to confidently secure their cloud-native environments. Unlike agentless alternatives, Tanium’s agent-based technology provides unparalleled visibility and control over both container images and runtime containers, delivering crucial contextual information to security and DevOps teams.

Key capabilities of Tanium Cloud Workloads include:

• Comprehensive vulnerability management: Continuous scanning of container images and their third-party components, providing the data needed to ensure that only secure images are deployed to production.
• Runtime container monitoring: Real-time visibility into running containers, enabling the rapid identification of privileged, rogue, and unauthorized containers.
• Kubernetes policy enforcement: Seamless integration with Kubernetes clusters, allowing for the creation and enforcement of policies to maintain compliance and security standards across the containerized environment.

By bridging the posture management and runtime security divide, Tanium Cloud Workloads empowers organizations to confidently embrace the agility and efficiency of cloud-native technologies without compromising their overall security posture. With statistics such as those reported by the Red Hat “State of Kubernetes Security” report, 46% of respondents identified revenue or customer loss as a result of a container and Kubernetes security incident, this unified approach is more critical than ever.

As the cloud security landscape continues to evolve, Tanium is positioned to be a trusted partner in navigating this dynamic environment and securing the future of your cloud-native applications. Schedule a personalized demo to learn how Tanium Cloud Workloads can help you bridge the gap and safeguard your organization’s cloud-powered transformation.