Cloud Security Assessment
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No matter which public cloud provider you use, it is all too common to find misconfigurations and poor practice. A cloud security assessment involves a comprehensive evaluation of a cloud environment to ensure its efficiency, security, and compliance with best practices.
A cloud audit focusing on various critical aspects such as security, cost optimization, cloud-native services, resilience, backups, IAM (Identity and Access Management), segmentation, and architecture involves a comprehensive evaluation of a cloud environment to ensure its efficiency, security, and compliance with best practices.
The audit typically includes:
Security Assessment:
- Evaluating security configurations and policies to protect against threats.
- Assessing encryption of data in transit and at rest.
- Reviewing network security settings, including firewalls and intrusion detection systems.
- Assess the use of cloud-native security services and alerting.
- Inspect the running environment to identify patching status of servers and applications.
Cost Optimization Analysis:
- Analysing resource utilization and costs to identify inefficiencies.
- Reviewing pricing models and reserved instance usage for cost savings.
- Evaluating auto-scaling settings and resource allocation for optimal usage.
Use of Cloud-Native Services:
- Assessing the adoption and implementation of cloud-native services for scalability and efficiency.
- Reviewing the integration of services like serverless computing, container orchestration, and managed databases.
Resilience and Disaster Recovery:
- Examining the strategies for high availability and disaster recovery.
- Assessing the effectiveness of redundancy and failover mechanisms.
- Reviewing geographic distribution of resources for business continuity.
Backups and Data Retention:
- Evaluating backup policies, schedules, and data retention practices.
- Reviewing the security and integrity of backup data.
- Review backup data immutability.
- Review backup restore plan and recent tests.
Identity and Access Management (IAM):
- Reviewing policies and controls for user authentication and authorization.
- Assessing the implementation of least privilege access and role-based access control (RBAC).
- Evaluating IAM policies for both internal users and external collaborators.
Management of secrets:
- Assess the storage of secrets to ensure they are effectively audited when accessed and changed.
- Assess the granularity of secrets to ensure that credentials are consumed in tightly scoped manner.
Network Segmentation and Micro-segmentation:
- Analysing network segmentation practices for security and efficiency.
- Reviewing the implementation of micro-segmentation for enhanced security within the cloud environment.
- Assessing virtual network configurations, including subnets, gateways, and peering.
Cloud Architecture Review:
- Evaluating the overall cloud architecture for best practices and performance.
- Reviewing the deployment of services and resources for optimal configuration.
- Assessing the scalability and maintainability of the cloud infrastructure.
- Ensure adequate protection from DDoS and web attacks.
- Identify Single Points of Failure (SPF).
Compliance with Standards and Best Practices (Typically CIS, PCI-DSS Optional):
- Checking adherence to relevant industry standards and compliance requirements.
- Reviewing documentation and policies for compliance verification.
Logging and Monitoring:
- Evaluate existing logging configuration to identify coverage of critical systems and services.
- Evaluate existing monitoring coverage.
- Review existing security and performance alerting.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Review:
- Assessing the use of IaC for provisioning and managing infrastructure.
- Reviewing the security and compliance of IaC scripts and templates.
- Evaluating version control, change management, and audit trails for IaC.
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WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY
Our internal IT team were in need of expert consultancy to help us strengthen our cybersecurity measures and protect our sensitive data.
We engaged the services of Punk Security and were thoroughly impressed with the level of professionalism and knowledge they brought to the table.
The team was able to provide valuable insights and recommendations, and their guidance helped us implement effective security protocols that have greatly enhanced our overall security posture.
We originally sought Punk’s services to support us with a potential cyber-attack. The team responded immediately, out of hours, and calmly and professionally walked us through the necessary steps to determine that our environment hadn’t been compromised.
Since then, we have engaged Punk to carry out a third party audit of our cloud environment and a gap analysis against the Cyber Essentials and ISO270001 criteria. The team provided a thorough report with recommendations and are now working with us to improve our processes and systems.
I feel assured that we are walking towards best practice security operations.
Having attended a live hack demo held at C4DI we approached Punk Security to help sure-up our cyber security and DevOps processes. Punk not only completed this audit but passed on valuable gained knowledge to our team to broaden their skills and insight in this area.
We have since continued to work in partnership with Punk to implement a WAF and frequently consult their expertise in DevOps in relation to our application so we can all learn and grow in a collaborative way.
Punk are approachable, knowledgeable and also adept at explaining in layman’s terms for the less technical! We look forward to continuing our fruitful working relationship.
Our team at Illumio recently participated in a custom CTF event hosted by Punk Security, and it was a great experience! The CTF was not only challenging but also immensely educational, especially in the realm of cloud security principles.
The challenges presented during the CTF were designed to cover a broad spectrum of cloud security topics. This approach allowed our team to dive deep into practical scenarios that tested our skills and pushed us to explore new strategies and technologies. The balance between difficulty and learning outcomes was perfectly struck, ensuring that each team member, regardless of their prior level of expertise, found the event to be rewarding.
Punk Security were happy to perform external scans pro bono due to our status as an NGO.
The team also spent meeting time on two separate occasions to discuss our requirements and provide advice without any commitment or expectation. I’ll certainly be coming to Punk Security again in future should we need further security services
Punk Security provided exceptional DevSecOps training for our engineers here at Sage and delivered an outstanding talk at our Securing Sage Summit.
Their expertise and knowledge were evident throughout the sessions.
Not only were they efficient and great to work with, but their presentation was also the highest rated session of the entire event. We highly recommend Punk Security for any security-related needs.
We initially reached out to Punk Security to help us out with our hosting architecture and were impressed with their breadth of knowledge.
With their expertise we were able to implement additional controls into AWS and successfully scale our systems. When we needed to gain more performance insights, their engineers configured our datadog platform end to end.
We’ve found that they really take the time to understand our problem and then put forward a great solution.