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Every day, we see new challenges emerging with cloud security which teams struggle to tackle.

For example, how do you get visibility into your decentralised, rapidly changing environment? How to prioritise the real risks and eliminate the noise of legacy tools? How do we ingrain security into the culture of cloud teams and get developers to remediate?

Organisations are adopting the cloud in more significant numbers, from small businesses to large enterprises. They see the benefits of scalability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness for their business.

But the cloud has also led to the most significant transformation to security in our lifetimes, and organisations are grappling with the unique new security challenges to protect their resources and data in the cloud.

Cloud security operations are a critical aspect of protecting an organisations cloud. Organisations must clearly understand the security risks and the appropriate measures to protect their environment.

In this practical guide, we will detail the journey organisations can take to achieve a cloud security operating model that enables visibility across a rapidly growing environment and appropriate measures to secure that environment efficiently.

This guide will provide a series of simple steps to build a cloud security foundation and mature your practice over time. By following these best practices, organisations can improve their overall cloud security posture and better protect their assets in the cloud.

The cloud is the most significant transformation to security in three important ways. The environment is entirely different development teams are now building in the cloud faster and with more decentralisation than ever before.

As a result, the environments are highly dynamic, with resources constantly being created, updated and deleted. This dynamic nature of the cloud makes it more challenging to keep track of and secure all resources across clouds and architectures.

Decentralised teams are also bringing in countless technologies that improve their efficiency. As a result, security teams must increasingly cover a multi-cloud, multi-architecture, constantly changing surface area. 2021s Log4Shell crisis demonstrates the difficulty for teams even to identify where they may have exposure across an increasingly complex and dynamic environment.

Cloud environments are now shared and controlled by third-party providers. With the public cloud, these environments are, by default, on the Internet or can be easily exposed to the Internet with a single configuration.

While exposure can happen simply, the underlying risk factors can be challenging to spot. Verizons annual DBIR report routinely cites complex intrusion attacks that combine two or more risk factors as the most common attack vector for data breaches.

This becomes even more difficult to monitor for and protect amid the unprecedented velocity and scale of attacks of todays landscape, where exposure can be exploited to become a breach in hours. Exposed databases are consistently one of the top breaches we read about in the news, underscoring the difficulty of securing an organisations crown jewels.

Development teams own their infrastructure, and each team chooses and deploys its own technologies. Centralised architectural choices can quickly become obsolete if they are not approved or adopted by decentralised teams.

An organisations people, processes and technology also face challenges in light of the new environment and risks. Many organisations must adapt their security practices and redefine traditional security approaches and processes that are not well-suited for the cloud environment.

There must also be a concerted focus on education as an increasing number of cloud teams building in the cloud often lack cloud security expertise. Security teams themselves need to learn the security risks of the cloud and implement new security processes and technologies to protect their resources. Many organisations need experts with deep domain expertise in cloud, architecture or risk vector.

Finally, teams must reconsider their tooling as many legacy technologies amplify overall cloud challenges with siloed views of the cloud environment and risk. For example, traditional tools may only look at a single architecture, such as containers or are only used by security teams, not DevOps teams. This leads to organisational siloes that make it more difficult for security and development teams to identify and remediate security issues.

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