Vulnerability remediation at your fingertips
Significance of remediation
Organizations embrace cloud to technologize their business. As the cloud environment is dynamic in nature, it is important for organizations to establish cloud specific governance policies to monitor multi-account configurations at multi-locations. Data is analyzed against pre-defined checks highlighting vulnerabilities if any, to yield appropriate actions and timely remedial measures.
Security misconfiguration on cloud is a typical concern and can be dealt with by adapting to pre-cloud and in-cloud security measures. Since issues are detected and logged on a continuous basis, remediation is also an on going process that help organizations get well architected, prevent security issues, optimize costs and achieve agile operational excellence.
Remediation via Tools
Many cloud security tools offer auto-remediation solutions that can be integrated with larger continuous remediation systems to address policy violations and help fix them.
CloudEnsure is one such tool that helps keep a watch on an organization’s cloud infrastructure proactively. Out of the various features that the CloudEnsure tool offers, the most significant is where it integrates natively to ITSM platforms in order to notify instant alerts and address security issues with manual as well as auto-remediation fixes.
On Cloud Ensure, user and account segregations can be created through the remediation module allowing role-based access and viewing of desired features. A simple example would be where a governance policy configuration can be created and edited only by users with admin rights such as an IT head or a business head while other users have read-only access to the policy violations and remediation actions.
Features of remediation on CloudEnsure
Once misconfigurations in cloud are identified, the cloud operations team builds a step-by-step best practices remediation checklist to recommend rectifications.
The CloudEnsure tool offers three variants of remediation:
Manual fix, One-Click fix and Automation.
Manual fix
Manual fixes are workable for all issues and available in two modes – CLI and Console. For instance, the assigned cloud team member can access issues pertaining to “Termination Protection status for EC2 instances” for an AWS Well architected account via the CloudEnsure tool to manually remediate the issue.
The tool, enables fixes, by running the code through the CLI command view that has detailed reasoning and logic explaining the code fix and is mostly operated by cloud engineers and developers.
Console fixes directs the team of business users and analysts to the AWS portal to follow a step-by-step remediation process irrespective of how affluent they are with the technicalities involved in the fixes.
One-click fix
CloudEnsure tool provides role- based access to one-click fixes, also known as semi-automated or partial automation fixes. Privileged users like the cloud admin team has authority to decide which issues would undergo one-click remediation and “Fix Now” option is made available for the same. The issue then gets queued for remediation on the tool.
One-click remediation, calls the API to fix issues of all severity, without impacting other services and configurations in the cloud architecture. There is also the option to go for “fix now” gradually, starting with low or moderately severe issues and then scaling to high severity.
If the ticket fails to get resolved, the issue status is changed back to failed and reassigned for a fix that is listed under the tasks section of the CloudEnsure tool. It can be tracked date-wise and task type-wise with account name and account type details.
Automation fix
Sometimes issues are critical and opting for manual remediation across real-time multiple instances become unfavorable. Auto remediation solutions set foot in usually when a cloud monitoring solution first triggers an alert in case of any policy breach and then provides pre-configured remedies based on business circumstances.
If an instance has unauthorized open ports, auto-remedial methods will be triggered to terminate the instance ensuring that the violation doesn’t
CloudEnsure ascertains the issues that can undergo auto-remediation and pre-schedules the fixes. Once successfully resolved, notifications stating that the cloud account is now optimized, is sent via emails or through integrated business communication channels like Slack to capture traceability of the fixes. These alerts are apprehended in reports too.
Automated remediation speeds up the indemnification process and ensure that organization’s cloud policies are streamlined and self-operational.reoccur.
Benefits
In today’s fast paced world, working on cloud guarantees accelerated business growth and increased stability. While identifying business concerns or generating visibility is a must, it is of utmost importance to ensure that violations are curtailed and issues are remediated conclusively.
If you are considering auto-remediation solutions for your cloud accounts or want to create accountability for your cloud architecture and endorse robust security measures in the process, do take advantage of CloudEnsure.
The CloudEnsure tool facilitates all of the above and more.