The digital landscape is a fast-changing one. Advancements come every other day, and some make things secure while others create new vulnerabilities. If we look at recent app development trends, it can be seen that cloud-native is increasingly becoming the industry’s norm. Many of the leading application development companies are shifting to cloud-native, which leaves us with one critical question: Is cloud-native secure? Especially for businesses?
To answer that, we need to build an understanding of what cloud-native is, what are the security threats faced by Cloud Native, and how they can be mitigated. Only then can we reasonably evaluate the security of Cloud Native for business applications?
What Exactly is Cloud-Native?
Cloud-native applications are developed to be executed in the cloud infrastructure. They employ contemporary technologies to develop, deploy and sustain applications. This approach makes it possible for businesses to adapt to the market trends easily.
New statistics reveal that more than 95% of new digital implementations will be run on cloud-native environments by 2025. This is a progress from 30% in 2021. According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), 76 percent of organizations that adopt cloud-native techniques use containers for almost all applications. Containers are useful in developing applications that can easily be scaled and are very efficient.
Some of the reports from Gartner point out that cloud-native platforms are becoming critical for new digital experiences. The CNCF Annual Survey 2022 gives an understanding of the extent of the use of cloud-native technologies. These reports provide important information to assess the effects of cloud-native applications to organizations.
Some of the examples of cloud-native applications are Netflix and Spotify. Netflix utilizes a microservices architecture to scale as fast as possible and satisfy the customers. Cloud-native technologies are used by Spotify to deliver the best music streaming service. These examples show how organisations can leverage the cloud-native approach to their advantage.
Cloud-native applications are designed with microservices and containers. Microservices are small services that are self-contained and that collectively make up an application. Containers are a form of virtualization that consist of all the necessary software to execute an application and can be moved from one host to another. This makes cloud-native applications more flexible and easier to manage.
The Adoption of Cloud-Native in the Business World
Cloud-native applications are being adopted at a fast pace in businesses. This change is due to the fact that today’s organizations require flexibility, modularity, and the ability to rapidly adapt to change. From the survey conducted by O’Reilly, it is evident that about 50% of organizations struggle with the skills required in cloud-native infrastructure. But the advantages are far from the difficulties.
Cloud-native applications are the key to innovation and the ability to expand new products and services rapidly. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, companies that had cloud-native apps could adapt to new volumes and survive the storm as compared to those who did not. This flexibility is very important for the long-term viability and profitability of the business.
In addition, cloud-native applications are increasingly becoming critical to digital transformations. They enable organizations to grow their applications, increase developers’ productivity, and increase robustness. For example, such sectors as government, financial, and health research sectors are among the most active users of cloud-native architectures.
Security Concerns Surrounding Cloud-Native
On paper, cloud-native is one of the most secure approaches to application development and deployment. However, it is not without its own security problems too. The OWASP Top 10 2021, for example, still influences the cloud-native infrastructure.
1. Limited Visibility
The first security drawback of cloud-native is that, unlike on-premise deployment. You cannot be sure about the security aspects of the cloud environment the application is hosted on. Hence, it becomes the duty of the IT team of a business to keep track of every single resource added to the application. This monitoring has to continue from the moment a new resource is created to when it is no longer used.
2. A Wide Variety of Threats
Because the cloud is open to anyone with an internet connection, people start coming up with newer ways to undermine the system’s security. As the hackers and attackers continue to advance their methods, developers and cybersecurity experts also need to improve their defending methods against such attacks.
The cloud attracts all kinds of attacks, from brute-forcing to phishing and from stolen credentials to SQL injection.
It’s not all bleak, however. If businesses know the concepts of data analysis, threat detection, and intrusion detection, they can avoid such attacks. It is not that the cloud is not safe. The fact of the matter is that the users need to be cautious to use cloud-native apps for business safely.
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3. Centralizing Security Policies is Difficult
As we know it today, the cloud-native environment includes a large number of tools from a variety of different providers and developers. That accordingly makes implementing consistent security policies extremely difficult.
According to the Enterprise Strategy Group, “In addition to increasing cost and complexity, the use of environment-specific cybersecurity controls contributes to an inability to implement centralized policies.”
Using a variety of different security tools is the best solution to this problem we have right now. For businesses looking to migrate to cloud-native, it is imperative to have a security solution that can streamline the entire cloud infrastructure. All infrastructure components must be also unified, and rulesets, policies, alerts, and remediation tactics are automated.
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4. Misconfigurations
Another issue facing cloud-native security is that of not properly configuring cloud-related systems. It is one of the most prevalent cloud-native security threats. It was the highest cloud security threat according to a recent report. In particular, 68% of the companies cited that misconfiguration was their greatest concern regarding cloud-native security.
When using cloud-native, the only way for a business to avoid this is to properly configure all components of the cloud environment to make sure no vulnerability can be exploited to undermine the security of the environment.
5. Slow Security Processes
One of the main reasons enterprises are moving to the cloud is because of the speed, agility, and flexibility it offers. As necessary, security can still fall behind the incredible speed of the continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipeline of cloud environments.
The problem is not that companies do not implement security measures. Many of the organizations using the cloud fail to give security more consideration than efficiency and speed.
But they can fix this issue by shifting security as far left as possible and ensuring security is always the first priority in the development, integration, and deployment process.
How Designveloper Tackle Cloud-Native Security Threats
Cloud-native applications are changing the face of businesses, but they bring security concerns. This brings out the importance of security measures that need to be put in place.
These threats are well managed by Designveloper, a leading web and software development company in Vietnam. We use best practices in security to safeguard our clients’ cloud-native applications and services. Our team has completed more than one hundred projects, for example, Lumin is a document platform with the built-in cloud storage.
Tools and Platforms We Use
Designveloper uses a strong synergy of AWS and Google Cloud to guarantee the security and performance of our cloud-based application development. Web and backend applications are deployed on two EKS clusters which are our primary infrastructure located on AWS. This setup enables us to assemble applications into Docker images and update infrastructure configurations as well.
With AWS, it is possible to launch applications and get them to the QC team in a matter of minutes. This kind of deployment allows us to deploy updates, bug fixes, and products to users several times a day. That is why our CI/CD pipeline guarantees that these processes are smooth and occur in a timely manner.
For data storage and analysis, we use Google Cloud’s BigQuery while Vertex AI for AI processing. These tools assist us in processing big data and executing other AI operations. This way, the mentioned services can be integrated with our applications based on AWS and offer the clients AI solutions.
Observability is Important
Cloud-native applications require observability as a key feature. It is proactive in the sense that it makes sure that the systems are up and running optimally. Designveloper realizes the importance of observability. We monitor our systems with the help of such tools as Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana. These tools assist in monitoring the consumption of resources, the delay of the system, as well as the pod placement on the nodes. For instance, in our EKS clusters, we keep a check on bytes in/out and latency to achieve the best results.
Furthermore, we employ synthetic tests with Datadog to check the stability of the system. Any anomalies are immediately reported to our Operations team through email and through the Slack messaging app. This makes it possible for us to attend to incidents as they occur and ensure the systems are always dependable.
Observability has been very useful in handling high load scenarios and this has been our experience. That way, when we identify problems, we can easily increase the amount of resources allocated to solving them. This is a proactive approach that assists in avoiding system failure and other related occurrences.
Conclusion
It is evident without a doubt that cloud-native is a solution that provides a lot of benefits to businesses, but security gaps do remain a massive concern. These security gaps mainly result from disparate security solutions, and a lack of visibility can further compromise security. The cloud is extremely scalable, and the deployment velocity is incredibly high, further making it difficult to implement proper security measures.
Is cloud-native safe? Yes, it can be if harmonious security measures are implemented as scalable and fast as cloud-native. In the end, if security is shifted left far enough and no known vulnerability is left, cloud-native is completely safe, but any slack in the security implementation can spell disaster.
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