During the rapid adoption of cloud technology during the COVID-19 pandemic, answers came quicker than questions. But as rising cloud costs and inherent complexity due to hybrid and multi-cloud architectures become clearer, the questions are mounting. While rising cloud bills have prompted businesses to push back, a less visible but potentially more damaging threat lies in the risk to business continuity posed by increasingly complex cloud architectures that were built first and designed later. Fortunately, identifying risks and understanding your attack surface in the cloud is a whole lot easier than deciphering your bill. With the advent of Automated Threat Modeling for cloud applications, One-Click™ Threat Modeling can get you back to a Secure by Design reality.
The Evolution of the Threat Landscape: A Cloud-First Reality
The shift toward multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and cloud-first infrastructures has transformed IT architecture, but it has also expanded the attack surface in unprecedented ways. Once securely housed in traditional data centers, critical assets now reside across vast, interconnected cloud environments. The cloud capabilities that make DevOps teams agile, are the same capabilities that introduce threat drift and misconfigurations into your applications. And according to research, 39% of cloud security incidents stem from misconfigurations alone.*
Threat Modeling is a proven way to reduce threats, but how can you proactively mitigate risks without breaking DevOther agility? Moving beyond reactive measures and embracing a proactive threat modeling strategy with Automated Cloud Threat Modeling will allow you to mitigate risks before they escalate into full-blown security incidents.
Threat Modeling: A Proactive Approach In Securing The Cloud
The proactive nature of threat modeling is what has made it the new standard in cloud security. Unlike traditional security approaches that react to incidents, threat modeling looks ahead and analyzes systems before vulnerability can actually be exploited.
Cloud threat modeling becomes complex due to highly interconnected services which rely on APIs and user permissions to interoperate. While process flow diagrams enable architects to point out these relationships, there are severe limitations. First, the diagrams become obsolete nearly as quickly as they’re built due to the nature of cloud app development. Second, a diagram alone is not a threat model. By adopting Automated Threat Modeling, your Diagrams get mapped to threats, and can show changes to the environment as soon as they’re made.
The Increasing Cost of Cloud Security Breaches
According to Gartner, by 2025, the average cost of a cloud security incident will exceed $5 million, resulting in data theft and legal, regulatory, and intractable reputational damages.
While external threats often dominate the cloud security conversation, insider threats pose an equally significant risk. Reports suggest that almost 20% of all breaches happen in the cloud due to insider threats, either through negligence or malicious intent. Increased reliance on more cloud-native applications will thus increase the risk of abuse from within.
Threat modeling helps organizations address this by providing detailed insights into access control and simulating potential insider threat scenarios. Implementing measures like Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and Just-In-Time (JIT) authorizations can significantly reduce insider threats.
Regulatory Pressure Is Growing
Regulated industries are already being asked to demonstrate a good understanding of the security risks in their cloud environment and efforts they have made to mitigate such risks. Threat modeling ensures that the organizations’ efforts toward security protect them not just for today, but for the regulations of the future.
Threat Modeling for Cloud Applications: A New Framework
Organizations must recognize that threat modeling in the cloud differs from traditional approaches.Critical steps in cloud-specific threat modeling are:
- Define Assets: Sensitive data, compute resources, and networking infrastructure are the key cloud assets.
- Map Process Flow: Know how data and processes flow from one service to another in the cloud, and analyze points of exposure.
- Identify Risks: Use methodologies like STRIDE or VAST to identify risks in cloud architecture.
- Establish Security Controls: For every identified risk, determine which security controls must be in place to counter it.
The advancements in the cloud-environment also mean that some risks are not addressed by conventional threat detection methods. Newer technologies like containers, serverless architecture, or API gateways introduce new threat parameters. Threat modeling is a continuous and iterative process accounting for evolving threat landscape with proactive threat research.
A New Standard in 2024
The paradigm has shifted and cloud breaches are no longer an acceptable risk for businesses. Not only do they result in a loss of consumer trust, but now increasingly there are regulatory and compliance penalties. Threat modeling promises a proactive, cost-effective, and scalable answer to the evolving threat landscape. As we move forward, Secure by Design must extend to cloud infrastructure as well.
CloudModeler: Elevating Cloud Security
CloudModeler is a threat modeling tool specifically designed for cloud environments. First, CloudModeler automatically creates threat models of your AWS or Azure operational cloud environments. In just minutes, you can build Threat Models of your live cloud environment which include a detailed visual representation of deployed resources. Second, it keeps the operational threat models synced with the live environment in real-time, helping you respond faster to drift or misconfigurations. To learn more about CloudModeler, reach out to one of our ThreatModeler experts.