Getting visibility into and control of complex or distributed cloud environments is not only a matter of investing in a CSPM (although that can be part of the answer). There are a number of additional approaches that can help. Let's look at a number of possibilities.
The most obvious step is using a CSPM to view and manage resources in a centralized location. There's no doubt that having everything in one place makes it easier to monitor and control your cloud environment. And a CSPM can scale as your environment changes, while helping to automate processes. CSPMs are a maturing technology that can be very effective in bringing a complex environment into compliance and the alerts and remediation offered help to harden security posture. The CSPM market includes Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Orca Security, Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management, Lacework, and Wiz, among others.
On the visibility front, cloud monitoring tools like Auvik, Datadog, Centreon, or Amazon CloudWatch and Azure Monitor provide metrics and logs that can be used to identify issues and optimize performance. They can alert you to potential problems before they become critical.
As noted, leveraging automation is going to be important when dealing with complex cloud estates. Automating common tasks will reduce the time and effort required to manage your cloud environment and can help create consistency across your systems. Tools like AWS CloudFormation, Google Cloud Deployment Manager, or Azure Resource Manager can automate the deployment and management of cloud resources.
But beyond the tools are the security best practices that can also help bring things under control and help narrow down the search for issues when they occur. They include role-based access control, network segmentation, and encryption and they should help reduce the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches.
Tried and true architectural approaches can also help, including containerization and microservices. These approaches simplify the management of complex or distributed cloud environments and break down applications into smaller, independent services, making issues easier to manage.
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Getting visibility into and control of complex or distributed cloud environments is not only a matter of investing in a CSPM (although that can be part of the answer). There are a number of additional approaches that can help. Let's look at a number of possibilities.
The most obvious step is using a CSPM to view and manage resources in a centralized location. There's no doubt that having everything in one place makes it easier to monitor and control your cloud environment. And a CSPM can scale as your environment changes, while helping to automate processes. CSPMs are a maturing technology that can be very effective in bringing a complex environment into compliance and the alerts and remediation offered help to harden security posture. The CSPM market includes Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Orca Security, Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management, Lacework, and Wiz, among others.
On the visibility front, cloud monitoring tools like Auvik, Datadog, Centreon, or Amazon CloudWatch and Azure Monitor provide metrics and logs that can be used to identify issues and optimize performance. They can alert you to potential problems before they become critical.
As noted, leveraging automation is going to be important when dealing with complex cloud estates. Automating common tasks will reduce the time and effort required to manage your cloud environment and can help create consistency across your systems. Tools like AWS CloudFormation, Google Cloud Deployment Manager, or Azure Resource Manager can automate the deployment and management of cloud resources.
But beyond the tools are the security best practices that can also help bring things under control and help narrow down the search for issues when they occur. They include role-based access control, network segmentation, and encryption and they should help reduce the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches.
Tried and true architectural approaches can also help, including containerization and microservices. These approaches simplify the management of complex or distributed cloud environments and break down applications into smaller, independent services, making issues easier to manage.