The 7 Pillars of Robust Cloud Security
February 16, 2023

Omer Dembinsky
Check Point Software Technologies

While cloud providers offer many cloud native security features and services, supplementary third-party solutions are essential to achieve enterprise-grade cloud workload protection(link is external) from breaches, data leaks, and targeted attacks in the cloud environment. The following are some industry best practices recommended:

1. Zero-trust cloud network security controls across logically isolated networks and micro-segments

Deploy business-critical resources and apps in logically isolated sections of the provider's cloud network, such as Virtual Private Clouds (AWS and Google) or vNET (Azure). Use subnets to micro-segment workloads from each other, with granular security policies at subnet gateways. Use dedicated WAN links in hybrid architectures and use static user-defined routing configurations to customize access to virtual devices, virtual networks and their gateways, and public IP addresses.

2. Shift your security left

Incorporate security and compliance protection early into the development lifecycle. With security checks integrated continuously into the deployment pipeline, rather than at the end, DevSecOps are able to find and fix security vulnerabilities early, accelerating an organization's time-to-market.

3. Keep code securely hygenic with vulnerability management

Set guardrails polices ensuring your deployment meets the corporate code hygiene policies. These policies will alert on deviation from the policy and can block deployments of non-compliant artifacts. Build remediation processes by alerting the development team on non- compliant artifacts with appropriate remediation.

Incorporate tools which provide the ability to explore vulnerabilities and SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) to quickly identify resources with critical vulnerabilities.

4. Avoid misconfiguration with continuous posture scanning

Cloud security vendors provide robust Cloud Security Posture Management(link is external), consistently applying governance and compliance rules to virtual servers. This helps to ensure they are configured to the best practices and properly segregated with access control rules.

5. Safeguarding all applications (and especially cloud-native distributed apps) with active prevention via IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) and next-generation web application firewall

Stop malicious traffic from reaching your web application servers. It automatically updates WAF rules in response to traffic behavior changes and is deployed closer to microservices that are running workloads.

6. Enhanced data protection with multi-layers

Enhanced data protection with encryption at all transport layers, secured file shares and communications, continuous compliance risk management, and maintaining good data storage resource hygiene such as detecting misconfigured buckets and terminating orphan resources will provide that additional security layer for an organization's cloud landscape.

7. Threat intelligence that detects and remediates known and unknown threats in real-time

Third-party cloud security vendors add context to the large and diverse streams of cloud-native logs by intelligently cross-referencing aggregated log data with internal data such as asset and configuration management systems, vulnerability scanners, etc. and external data such as public threat intelligence feeds, geolocation databases, etc. They also provide tools that help visualize and query the threat landscape and promote quicker incident response times. AI-based anomaly detection algorithms are applied to catch unknown threats, which then undergo forensics analysis to determine their risk profile. Real-time alerts on intrusions and policy violations shorten times to remediation, sometimes even triggering auto-remediation workflows.

Omer Dembinsky, Data Group Manager at Check Point Software Technologies
Share this

Industry News

April 17, 2025

GitLab announced the general availability of GitLab Duo with Amazon Q.

April 17, 2025

Perforce Software and Liquibase announced a strategic partnership to enhance secure and compliant database change management for DevOps teams.

April 17, 2025

Spacelift announced the launch of Saturnhead AI — an enterprise-grade AI assistant that slashes DevOps troubleshooting time by transforming complex infrastructure logs into clear, actionable explanations.

April 16, 2025

CodeSecure and FOSSA announced a strategic partnership and native product integration that enables organizations to eliminate security blindspots associated with both third party and open source code.

April 16, 2025

Bauplan, a Python-first serverless data platform that transforms complex infrastructure processes into a few lines of code over data lakes, announced its launch with $7.5 million in seed funding.

April 15, 2025

Perforce Software announced the launch of the Kafka Service Bundle, a new offering that provides enterprises with managed open source Apache Kafka at a fraction of the cost of traditional managed providers.

April 14, 2025

LambdaTest announced the launch of the HyperExecute MCP Server, an enhancement to its AI-native test orchestration platform, HyperExecute.

April 14, 2025

Cloudflare announced Workers VPC and Workers VPC Private Link, new solutions that enable developers to build secure, global cross-cloud applications on Cloudflare Workers.

April 14, 2025

Nutrient announced a significant expansion of its cloud-based services, as well as a series of updates to its SDK products, aimed at enhancing the developer experience by allowing developers to build, scale, and innovate with less friction.

April 10, 2025

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd.(link is external) announced that its Infinity Platform has been named the top-ranked AI-powered cyber security platform in the 2025 Miercom Assessment.

April 10, 2025

Orca Security announced the Orca Bitbucket App, a cloud-native seamless integration for scanning Bitbucket Repositories.

April 10, 2025

The Live API for Gemini models is now in Preview, enabling developers to start building and testing more robust, scalable applications with significantly higher rate limits.

April 09, 2025

Backslash Security(link is external) announced significant adoption of the Backslash App Graph, the industry’s first dynamic digital twin for application code.

April 09, 2025

SmartBear launched API Hub for Test, a new capability within the company’s API Hub, powered by Swagger.

April 09, 2025

Akamai Technologies introduced App & API Protector Hybrid.