During most of my discussions with C-level stakeholders, a major question arises: What can we do to add further defense to our public cloud deployments? Are the built-in cloud security controls sufficient for my business, or do we need more?

My answer is quite simple: Yes, you need additional controls, depending on the workloads you are going to deploy in public clouds.

A Shared Responsibility

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud services built on the shared responsibility model allow the organization to assess what additional security controls are needed. It’s the organization’s responsibility to secure the workload hosted in cloud environment; the cloud provider will be responsible below the operating system (OS) layer only.

While cloud providers are getting more mature and trying to offer a broader range of cloud security controls, it’s still the bare minimum. AWS provides the security group and NaCl capabilities as the minimum, for example, but not intrusion prevention controls, web application level security, threat intelligence capabilities or other features.

Another problem is that public cloud providers only provide site-to-site VPN, not client-to-site termination capability. This means that you need to route your user traffic (even for your remote users) through your corporate network, which results in performance issues, additional cost and increased complexity.

Next-Gen Cloud Security Controls

So now the question is: What should we do to add additional security controls at the perimeter of our public cloud deployments?

Security gateways and firewall providers are getting quite mature, and offerings are more aligned with industry needs. Next-gen firewall and UTM products are built for virtual environments from the bottom-up.

Investing more into these next-gen products will ensure better control of your public cloud and make your life easier during audits. Deploying a next-gen virtual firewall in your public cloud environment will also allow your security administrator to define context-based rules and ACLs to protect your environment. Additionally, it will permit your remote users to directly terminate to the public cloud environment.

In a nutshell, additional cloud security controls are worth every penny of your investment.

Read the IDC white paper: A CISO’s Guide to Enabling a Cloud Security Strategy