Take a Unified Approach to Zero Trust and Network Visibility in Cloud Native Environments

The potential advantages of cloud native applications and environments include the ability to scale massively and increase deployment speeds from multiple times a year to multiple times a day. However, those same benefits also create new considerations for security: how do you keep thousands or hundreds of thousands of apps or services secure?

Take autoscaling (also known as dynamic scaling), for example. It can help improve performance, keep costs in check and improve resiliency – but it can also potentially introduce new security risks like the automation introducing CVEs. 

Fortunately, there are multiple tools for, and methods of, mitigating risks. The most trust-based security strategy for microservices is zero trust, especially when its principles and practices are paired with enhanced network visibility.

Understanding Zero Trust Security in Cloud Native Environments

There’s an even broader paradigm shift that supersedes any specific type of risk or threat: traditional perimeter-based approaches to network security simply aren’t comprehensive or proactive enough for modern cloud native applications and infrastructure. The traditional network perimeter has essentially disappeared as applications and infrastructure have become more and more distributed across public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

Enter the zero trust model of security, which moves away from reactive deny-list defenses to proactively validate everything a user or system does. The key concept here is “never trust, always verify” – meaning that you define access and allowable behavior for users and applications and then continuously validate it. 

Another important concept in zero trust is “assume breach,” which is a recognition of the complexity of today’s risks that can’t be effectively mitigated with legacy security strategies. Traditional perimeter-based approaches aren’t effective against previously unknown threats (“zero day” vulnerabilities) or against insider threats, for example. Zero trust starts with an assumption that potential threats are everywhere.

Here’s a simple metaphor to illustrate: imagine a house with an unlocked front door. It’s relatively simple for someone to open the door and enter the house. In the zero trust model, however, once inside the house, they can’t move to another room – much less change the thermostat, turn on the oven, or open a window – without explicit permission.

Zero trust is especially useful in cloud native application development, especially when relying on CI/CD pipelines that automatically deploy new code or updates to existing code – sometimes hundreds of times a day – to infrastructure that is usually both distributed (i.e. multiple clouds and data centers) and ephemeral (such as dynamic scaling of new environments to meet increased demand, or to scale up and down as the system deploys or updates containers, for example.)

Moreover, cloud native tools such as Kubernetes (for container orchestration) or Helm charts (for managing Kubernetes apps) or observability solutions (for monitoring) enable highly automated, granular implementations of zero trust principles and policies.

Supply Chain Security: Implementing Zero Trust in Containerized Applications

Containerized applications – especially when paired with microservices architecture – are well-suited to zero trust principles because they are typically designed with granular segmentation and abstraction in mind.

This is particularly true given the relationship between containerized workloads and Kubernetes, as well as other cloud native tooling for automation and monitoring.

Applying zero trust to containerized applications should focus on strict identity verification, least privilege access and micro-segmentation. No user or application component should have any access or system privilege that it does not need to perform its job effectively – none. And that should be applied at the smallest unit or segment possible, which is why microservices are an especially good fit here.

Kubernetes is a great enabler here. It’s a declarative, rules-based system, which means administrators can set their desired state for the application and its infrastructure and then configure Kubernetes to only allow those predefined permissions and behaviors for network connections, processes and file access within the workload.

Kubernetes enables lots of robust security capabilities that serve zero trust strategies, such as network policies, pod security standards and role-based access control (RBAC).

The Role of Network Visibility in Cloud Native Security

Zero trust security in cloud native environments can be further bolstered by enhanced network visibility, especially as the network becomes less of a physical, tangible entity and far more virtual and distributed than ever.

Securing cloud native workloads and infrastructure requires real-time monitoring not just of ingress/egress traffic but also of east-west traffic across machines in a datacenter or cloud. Containerized applications – and especially containerized microservices – greatly increases the volume of east-west traffic. 

Securing that flow is critical because a single vulnerable container image or server could otherwise enable an attacker to move not just in and out of the environment but laterally within it. Without effective monitoring, they could do so undetected.

Network visibility can be enhanced with modern monitoring tools, service mesh technology that handles communication between services in a cloud native app, and cloud native security tools. This mix of tools enables continuous real-time monitoring, anomaly detection and traffic analysis across containerized environments.

How Zero Trust and Network Visibility Complement Each Other

Zero trust security strategies benefit from enhanced network visibility because it allows for more granular and detailed access control and threat detection.

Network visibility tools in particular can help security teams continuously monitor and enforce zero trust policies in real-time, across identities, devices, applications and traffic. Key technologies and practices here include:

• Microsegmentation: Breaking things down to their smallest units enables fine-grained validation and policy enforcement while also limiting the “blast radius” of an incident.
• Identity management: Sophisticated tools for managing and verifying identity (such as RBAC and identity access management technologies) are essential for the “never trust, always verify” principle.
• Continuous real-time monitoring: You can’t protect what you can’t see. Cloud native environments are inherently more distributed and ephemeral and require comprehensive visibility and observability to secure. 

For a deep dive on implementing a zero trust security strategy, check out our free eBook, Zero Trust Container Security for Dummies. It includes a four-step framework for migrating to zero trust that covers the key principles we’ve introduced here:

1. Understand user profiles and gain asset visibility – again, emphasizing the crucial link between zero trust and comprehensive network visibility with continuous real-time monitoring capabilities.
2. Harden your devices and network environment – including the implementation of any new tools necessary for securing your cloud-native applications and infrastructure.
3. Build security into your pipelines and deploy microsegmentation – this is where you secure your CI/CD pipeline and define allowable access and behavior for your applications.
4. Expand to include data protection, automation, and compliance – including an increasing emphasis on security automation.

Want to learn more about zero trust security? Check out the Gartner report, Predicts 2024: Zero Trust Journey to Maturity, for trends and strategies to improve your zero trust security posture.