When compared to conventional platforms, cloud-native development enables businesses to create apps with greater elasticity and scalability. However, the use of cloud-native components like container orchestration and distributed infrastructure gives attackers more chances to take advantage of development pipeline flaws like misconfigurations.
The industry’s solution to this issue is vulnerability management, detection, and response, or VMDR. It combines various security functions into a single automated workflow so that DevOps teams can better identify, rank, and fix the most vulnerable assets before they are released for deployment. Even though the speed and scalability of the cloud environment are important features for any growing business, securing cloud implementation necessitates managing vulnerabilities.
Think about this: 26% of cloud compromises were linked to attacks exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities, despite a sixfold increase in new vulnerabilities in the cloud over the past six years.
There is wide agreement that cloud-native application challenges are prompting more slow sending cycles, with 2 of every 3 respondents in a new study highlighting security as the top obstacle.
According to CRA Business Intelligence’s survey of IT respondents, 36% specifically mentioned the lack of prevention capabilities in cloud-native services as their greatest concern, while 53% stated that their top concern regarding storing data in the cloud was a lack of detection and response capabilities.
Cloud-Native infrastructure
These flaws are all caused by inadequate vulnerability management. Conventional border based protections essentially can’t stay aware of the quick twist up of microservices and serverless engineering that cloud-local improvement involves. More businesses are seriously considering how VMDR can meet their cloud-native security requirements in light of these gaps.
Organizations can track not only approved cloud-based assets but also unauthorized devices and endpoints that shouldn’t be there thanks to automatic asset management and discovery. A global IT asset inventory, which is updated in real time to reflect changes in the environment, is then fed with the detailed information it collects about each asset—such as performance, origin, file type, and dependencies.
Organizations can get information about their cloud assets’ compliance status and security posture through automated vulnerability management. Customers of Qualys, a provider of VMDR solutions, have access to a custom dashboard where they can check these real-time status updates, including alerts about vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that have been discovered.
Prioritization and detection of threats .VMDR will automatically prioritize the most critical assets out of a possible field of hundreds with the assistance of threat intelligence, advanced correlation, and machine learning so that businesses can truly focus resources on the most time-sensitive, at-risk vulnerabilities.
Implementation of the response patch: VMDR can immediately take action upon detecting a threat by either patching the vulnerability or quarantining it to prevent its spread throughout the network. The common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS), real-time threat indicators, historical risk trends, and known threat actors are all used by VMDR to ensure that its response and patch procedures put the most pressing risks first.
Cloud-Native applications
Why VMDR is good for cloud-native workloads VMDR is good for cloud-native organizations because its security functions work well with and scale to cloud-native requirements. In contrast to the cloud, traditional or legacy app development typically relies heavily on in-house server space, requiring significantly more upkeep and care.
When it comes to owning and maintaining a server, regular patch management, identity and access management, updating, and proper configuration are expected. A single server can only provide infrastructure to a limited number of apps and end-user devices before performance is impaired due to size and bandwidth constraints, in addition to these responsibilities. While cloud services do not have these limitations, they do necessitate a security model that is more adaptable and capable of managing vulnerabilities at the scale and speed of this serverless environment.
VMDR stands out from the competition because it was designed specifically for the cloud. Its emphasis on automating vulnerability management enables businesses to better comprehend, anticipate, and intelligently respond to risk. There are a number of reasons why cloud-native applications can benefit greatly from this.
VMDR can give engineers proactive identification early and ceaselessly. By providing engineers with crucial insights and simple tools to fix vulnerabilities that are automatically flagged early in the pipeline, VMDR takes the process of shifting security left to the next level.
Drag-and-drop visual no-code workflows are one of these tools, allowing developers to automate previously laborious and time-consuming vulnerability management checks. Out-of-the-box integration with IT service management tools like ServiceNow and JIRA, which automatically generates remediation tickets and tags vulnerable assets with risk scores so that developers can address them, is another advantage.
To identify risk, VMDR looks at dependencies and business criticality. Alert fatigue is frequently mentioned by security teams as a problem. Over 500 cloud security alerts are received by IT professionals on an average daily. For the majority of security teams, this is an unsustainable workload, even with a designated cloudsec admin. By prioritizing assets that require immediate remediation and automating alert analysis and risk assessment, VMDR simplifies vulnerability management.
The critical context for treating vulnerabilities is driven by VMDR. evOps teams are able to comprehend the context surrounding identified vulnerabilities, which includes the overall risk and potential impact, thanks to VMDR’s real-time visibility into cloud assets and dependencies.
Teams are able to address vulnerabilities in the order in which they are most important, from least important to most important. Qualys case studies show that customers of VMDR were able to patch CISA’s Top 15 known exploited vulnerabilities of 2021 60 percent faster than customers of traditional patch management solutions, significantly reducing the mean time to remediation (MTTR).