Cloud Security Maturity Model: vision, path, execution

Securing cloud infrastructure is rife with challenges and high stakes. Cloud complexity, tool sprawl, and organisational silos cause security gaps, that, depending on security maturity, can result in a compromised security posture.

The work involved in achieving a mature cloud security posture is not insignificant. As cloud environments are dynamic, highly complex and scale quickly, the variables involved in designing and implementing a security strategy can often thwart progress. Whilst the scarcity of talent only compounds the challenge.

Best practices and compliance standards can help guide a security team in the right direction, but standards are often written abstractly, whilst best practices can be too specific, making it extremely difficult to practically apply the guidance.

Tenable, the cloud security specialists, recognise this challenge and have created a lightweight framework to help easily assess current level of security maturity in each of the crucial domains of cloud security. They call it the Tenable Cloud Security Maturity Model.

What is the Cloud Security Maturity Model?

The framework has two parent categories:

• organisation- personnel and procedures needed to main a secure environment
• technology – technical controls and configurations in visibility, prevention and detection.

Organisations are allocated one of four maturity levels against each of the sub-sections:

• Level 1 – Ad Hoc: reactive management of cloud security with little or no processes
• Level 2 – Opportunistic: more structure is applied to cloud security, resulting in the beginnings of a strategic approach
• Level 3 – Repeatable: responding to changes and challenges through an easily replicable cloud security strategy
• Level 4 – Automated and integrated: the automatic application of the most significant components of the cloud security strategy.

Tenable stress that the framework isn’t simply a long and exhaustive checklist, but a tool to help an organisation progress to cloud security maturation in a controlled and synchronised manner.

How to use the framework

The framework is designed to be simple and usable, and Tenable suggest implementing it through the following stages:

• Qualify – studiously assess your organisation’s current level in each of the sub-sections. The framework works best when an honest assessment of current status is made, this gives confidence to progress.
• Set milestones – identify the main criteria that will advance the organisation forward and aim to initially advance each domain in sync.
• Execute - build clear and measurable security milestones into the roadmap of all relevant stakeholders and execute
• Repeat – qualify the results of the execute stage and establish an execution cadence based on needs and abilities.

Understanding the current security maturation level is the first step in building a robust cloud security posture. This framework will help, it is an incredibly useful tool for progressing toward an iterative cloud security programme and can be used to propel your organisation toward security maturity in this hugely important domain.

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About Tenable Cloud Security 

Tenable Cloud Security reveals, prioritizes and remediates security gaps in cloud infrastructure. It unifies and automates full asset discovery, deep risk analysis, runtime threat detection and compliance, and empowers stakeholders with pinpoint visualization, guided recommendations and collaboration. Tenable Cloud Security is a comprehensive cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) spanning cloud security posture management (CSPM), cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), cloud workload protection (CWPP), Kubernetes security posture management (KSPM) and infrastructure as code (IaC) security.