6 Ways Orchestration Reduces Cloud Security Risk

Roee Shohat, Head of Go to Market

November 2, 2023

In a nutshell, when it comes to risk reduction in remediation, two key elements are crucial:

Importance level: Prioritize the remediation of the most critical issues.

Time efficiency: Minimize the time required for remediation.

These elements can be further categorized into six components. By utilizing orchestration for cloud security, you can achieve the following:

1. Consolidation

Using orchestration for cloud security enables the consolidation of alert information from multiple tools. It involves ingesting data about security issues and comparing it with other potential findings to remove duplicates and enhance existing information. This process greatly improves organizing efficiency.

2. Context

To determine the importance and relevance of an issue for remediation, security teams need to gather specific information, including business criticality, environment type, and more. This context encompasses factors such as network access, the environment's development or production status, and the type of data being processed along with its compliance requirements. Having this information is crucial for prioritizing and making informed decisions.

3. Exposure

Gaining a comprehensive understanding of the security incident requires considering various factors. This includes evaluating the significance of the system affected by the issue and considering the collected contextual information (mentioned above). It also involves assessing the system's vulnerability to external threats and the potential exploitability of the issue.

The first three stages - consolidation, context, and exposure - involve collecting, assessing, and analyzing important information to formulate an action plan. Once a decision is reached, the subsequent three stages involve orchestrating the remediation process.

4. Ownership and Attribution

Before initiating the remediation process, security teams need to determine the responsible party, whether it be the individual who made a change through code, console, CLI, or the designated owner of a specific system. This task involves establishing connections with various systems, such as cloud auditing tools, code repositories, CI/CD pipelines, and asset management systems. By streamlining this process, orchestration enables efficient and effective identification of issue owners.

5. Guide Collaboration Around Remediation

Facilitating communication with engineers or developers via their preferred tools is essential. During this stage, it is crucial to monitor response times to ensure adherence to policy or service level agreements (SLAs). Additionally, identifying managers and escalating issues, as well as managing exceptions with the GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) team or other relevant stakeholders, are important tasks.

Performing these activities manually consumes valuable time for security professionals, but they can be automated and centrally managed through appropriate orchestration tools. By leveraging the right orchestration tools, these communication processes can be optimized and made more efficient.

6. The Resolution

Lastly, resolving an issue often requires a considerable amount of time from both security teams and engineering teams to understand the necessary steps and solutions.

By presenting appropriate remedies with code fixes or environment changes that are easily understandable to developers or engineers, remediation timelines can be greatly shortened.

Employing suitable orchestration tools for remediation can notably alleviate alert fatigue, minimize management efforts, and foster smoother collaboration between security teams and the rest of the organization.