With the rise of cloud adoption and the pace of technological change, building a holistic security architecture has never been more critical to protecting an organization’s assets in the cloud.
In this blog post, we will explore the top five security principles for safeguarding your cloud applications,
which we shared in the webinar “The Top 5 Principles for Successful Cloud Security”.
At Fortinet, we are committed to helping our customers stay up to date with a comprehensive security strategy and the right tools to ensure their hybrid environment remains secure. Image 1 illustrates the five cloud security principles designed to guide your current strategy and deepen your understanding of the rapidly evolving cloud risks.
1. Identity and Access Management
In today's cloud-centric environment, identities have become the new security perimeter. When you register with a cloud provider, a username and password are the foundational assets. Given the interconnected nature of cloud services, implementing the principle of least privilege is crucial. This involves establishing granular control policies to ensure that both user and service accounts are granted only the necessary permissions for their tasks. More recently, many significant cloud breaches stem from leaked credentials and over-permissive roles. Therefore, protecting identity is paramount. The following key initiatives are at the forefront of this effort:
- Centralized Identity Management: A strong multi-cloud security strategy starts with establishing a single source of truth for user identities across all cloud environments. It simplifies management, improves consistency, and enhances security by providing a unified view of who has access to what.
- Access Control Mechanisms: Implementing robust access control models such as Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), which granted user’s or services’ account based on specific attributes of user, resource, and environment, offering more granular control.
- Zero Trust Security Model: This core principle assumes that no user, service account, or network traffic is trusted and must be verified before granting access.
- Least Privilege: Granting users and services only the minimum level of access necessary to perform their tasks. This limits the potential damage if an identity is compromised.
- Secure Password and Key Management: Requiring the users to provide multiple verification factors (MFA, FIDO2, Adaptive MFA) and implementing a policy of rotation mechanisms for API keys, access tokes and other sensitive credentials are extra layers of protection.
- Real-time Monitoring and Anomaly Detection: Implementing tools that continuously monitor identity related events and generate alerts for suspicious activities or unusual patterns. Establishing automated workflows to respond to detected threat, such as, revoking access, isolating compromised account, or trigger further investigation.
2. Network Security
Securing network traffic remains a critical and key pillar for cloud security. Traditional security controls available in the cloud do not provide the adequate protection and controls required by organizations. The lack of deep inspection and comprehensive visibility are among the top missing capabilities.
Therefore, establishing robust network security capabilities is important to shield your data, critical applications, and dynamic workloads from the evolving landscape of cyber threats. Regardless of your workload form-factor – whether containerized applications, virtual machines, or serverless functions – organizations need solutions that provide full visibility into their network flows, especially considering that containers and serverless functions frequently communicate with external APIs and rely on various third-party services. Achieving and maintaining granular control and comprehensive visibility over network traffic is a strong recommendation.
Cloud providers have actively fostered partnerships with leading network security firewall vendors to enhance their native offerings for advanced network protection, including the deployment of Next-Generation Firewalls. Consequently, when evaluating the deployment of an Advanced Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) in the cloud, it is paramount to ensure seamless and native integration with cloud-specific networking services. Examples of such critical integrations include AWS Gateway Load Balancer, Azure Virtual WAN, or Google Network Security Integration. These native integrations ensure optimal performance, scalability, and manageability within the cloud.
While deploying an in-line protection solution like an Advanced NGFW can offer significant benefits, it might not always be a viable deployment model for all cloud scenarios. In such use cases, we strongly recommend implementing out-of-band solutions, such as Network Detection and Response (NDR) platforms. Rather than being mutually exclusive, NDR solutions can augment NGFW deployments by passively monitoring network traffic to detect suspicious behaviors, anomalies, and threats — even within encrypted traffic. Together, NGFW and NDR form a layered defense approach that enhances visibility and threat detection across your cloud environment.
3. Application and API Security
Applications and APIs are at the core of today’s business, driving innovation, enabling seamless customer experiences, and allowing organizations to scale rapidly. Yet as API expose your core application logic, and often expose sensitive information, they have become the favorite target for cybercriminals. In fact, a recent Postman survey found that nearly 80% of the internet traffic today is API traffic, underscoring how critical this frontend business logic has become. APIs serve as the interface to your application logic and, in many cases, expose sensitive data, such as, personally identifiable information (PII).
Whether your workloads run in containers, virtual machines, or serverless environments, protecting your application perimeter through advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) is your frontline defense against the constantly evolving threat landscape. A modern WAF applies multi-layered defenses to keep your application safe, including:
- Bot Management: Detect and mitigate both good and bad bots through behavior analysis ad rate limiting.
- OWASP top 10 Coverage: Automate protection against injection flaws, broken authentication, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other risks, with continuous updates as new vulnerabilities emerge.
- Behavior Anomaly Detection: Leverage machine learning and AI to profile normal application behavior and flag deviation that may indicate an attack in progress.
By combining these capabilities, an advanced WAF not only shields your application from today’s top threats but also adapts as new ones arise, keeping your business application and data secure.
4. Data Protection
Data protection and data governance have become increasingly critical as enterprises recognize the extent of data sprawl and lack of visibility into the posture of their sensitive information. Questions like: “Where is our sensitive information stored?” and “Which data repositories span our on-premises and cloud environments?” are forcing organizations to rethink their data security strategies.
Beyond basic encryption, many are turning to next generation Data Security Posture Management (DSPM). Unlike legacy tools that rely on regex rules, DSPM platforms leverage machine learning and AI to discover and classify sensitive information automatically, lightening the load on security and operations teams. But adopting DSPM isn’t just a technology upgrade, it also requires reengineering processes to continuously monitor and assess data, ensuring that security controls remain consistent across every environment.
Key DSPM use cases:
- Data Classification: Identify and tag critical and sensitive information wherever it lives.
- Access Control: Monitor who has permission to which data, and flag anomalous access patterns.
- Risk Remediation: Provide prioritized recommendations, such as tightening overly broad permission and archiving unused data to proactively prevent data loss and reduce the attack surface.
- Incident Response & Recovery: Maintain up-to-date backups, detailed audit logs, and playbooks so you can react quickly to breaches or inadvertent exposures.
The surge of generative AI adds a new layer of complexity. As organizations train large-language models on proprietary data via Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), it becomes paramount to know exactly which data is being ingested. You must ensure that no personally identifiable information, intellectual property, or other sensitive content slips into your AI training pipelines.
To safeguard against data leakage and the risk of harmful or unintended outputs, you need strong guardrails at every stage—storage, processing, and model training. This means enforcing encryption, robust classification, and strict access controls, all woven into your software development lifecycle. By integrating security at earliest stages of application lifecycle, you can catch misconfigurations, miscoding and vulnerable libraries before they ever reach production.
Thus, protecting organization’s data demands a combination of advanced tooling (like Next-Gen DSPM), clear processes, and a security-first mindset throughout development and operations.
5. DevSecOps
Implementing a DevSecOps strategy is paramount. Begin by identifying every library and dependency in your application code, infrastructure-as-code templates, and container images, so that you have full visibility before anything reaches production.
To illustrate, think of a food package’s ingredient list. When you pick up a product at the grocery store, you check for preservatives, allergens, or expiration dates to ensure it is safe to consume. If you have a peanut allergy and see peanuts listed, you can decide whether to take the risk of eating it or not. If you choose to do so, you might take medication to reduce the harmful effects.
The same principle applies to software development:
- Dependency Inventory: As known as Software Composition Analyzes (SCA), which catalogue every third-party library and packages your code includes.
- Vulnerability Scanning: Identify known security flaws (CVE) in those components.
- Risk Assessment: Determine which vulnerabilities pose real threats and prioritize remediations steps.
By embedding security by design principle, so that vulnerability discovery, risk analysis, and remediation are baked into every stage of your CI/CD pipeline, you create a multi-layered defense that strengthens your cloud environment.
Conclusion
As organizations architect and operate across multi-cloud environments, a defense-in-depth approach becomes essential to safeguard critical assets and sensitive data. By layering identity and access management, network controls, application and API protection, data governance, and DevSecOps practices, you build resilient security that covers every angle.
Modern threats move at machine speed, and so must your defenses. Leveraging AI-powered tools, such as Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), with behavioral anomaly detection and alert correlation, empowers your security operations teams to cut through noise, prioritize top risks, and respond faster.
Yet technology alone isn’t enough. Engaging a specialized Fortinet’s experts from Cloud Consulting Services team can accelerate your journey by refining your cloud security blueprint, embedding best-practice architectures, and ensuring smooth implementation across diverse platforms.
Next Step:
Reach out to Fortinet’s vendor-agnostic Cloud Consulting team at consulting@fortinet.com today to assess and plan your cloud architecture in alignment with industry-leading cloud security best practices.
