Commentary on 2024 Van Bourne Study: Tufin's Crucial Role in Strengthening Cloud Security

Last updated May 9th, 2024 by Erez Tadmor

Dark Reading recently published an article highlighting a study from earlier this year that showed that nearly half of all breaches organizations faced in the past year originated in the cloud. As a result, the average organization lost almost $4.1 million to cloud breaches in the past year alone.

What’s more, the study found that 46% of organizations studied don’t have full visibility in the connectivity of their organization’s cloud services.

Among a host of other learnings—chief among them the fact that as businesses increasingly migrate to cloud environments to capitalize on their benefits, they are simultaneously exposed to heightened security risks—the findings from this study underscore two hard truths:

The cloud isn’t inherently more secure than on-premises environments

Organizations need to layer on additional security

This underscores the critical importance of solutions like Tufin, which provide an essential layer of protection in the complex cloud security landscape.

Read on to learn how Tufin empowers cloud security and elevates, secures, and optimizes network security, solving problems around lack of visibility, policy management complexity, inconsistent security responses, audit fines, and more.

The Cloud Isn’t More Secure Than On-Premises

Cloud service providers offer foundational security measures but must offer comprehensive solutions against evolving threats targeting cloud environments. Dark Reading’s article underscores the necessity for additional security layers in cloud environments—challenging the perception of inherent cloud security and demonstrating the need for additional, proactive security solutions.

The complexity of managing security policies across diverse cloud platforms, services, and deployments poses a significant challenge for organizations. Tufin addresses this challenge by offering centralized visibility and control over the entire network infrastructure, spanning both on-premises and cloud environments.

This unified approach empowers security teams to enforce consistent policies, identify vulnerabilities, and respond proactively to emerging threats.

More understanding and implementation are often needed in the shared responsibility model of cloud security, where providers safeguard the infrastructure, but customers are still responsible for securing their data and applications.

Tufin bridges this gap by empowering organizations to implement granular security policies tailored to their needs, ensuring compliance with industry standards and regulations.

For example, through automated policy changes, network segmentation, and more, Tufin ensures organizations proactively identify policy violations before implementing network changes. More specifically, Tufin drives continuous compliance by:

Developing and managing a unified security policy (USP) across hybrid-cloud devices
Demonstrating immediate compliance proof without manual, time-consuming processes
Ensuring software and application configurations remain compliant

Tufin Extends Network Security to the Cloud

DevOps practices and cloud-native development have experienced a significant boost thanks to the speed, scalability, and flexibility cloud platforms and tooling offer. However, to truly unlock their potential, it’s essential to integrate security seamlessly into this mix. The synergy between DevOps, cloud-native development, and robust security measures can yield remarkable results when done effectively.

Tufin’s network security solutions enhance the security of large enterprises dealing with intricate operations and multi-vendor, hybrid-cloud networks. Automation is critical to enhancing security posture in the cloud era, and Tufin excels in automating labor-intensive tasks such as policy management, risk analysis, and compliance auditing.

Tufin boasts a deep bench of process automation solutions, including policy clean-up, rule lifecycle management, change automation, and more, from a single console for all major network, SDN, and cloud platforms. By automating these processes, organizations can minimize human errors and reduce the likelihood of misconfigurations that could lead to security breaches.

Beyond that, Tufin boasts the industry’s most advanced topology map with the broadest coverage of cloud network technologies. Tufin’s topology provides NetSec and CloudSec teams real-time visibility into their networks, enabling precise change implementation with topology-based automation, swift issue identification and correction, and reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Furthermore, Tufin seamlessly integrates with existing security technologies and cloud platforms, ensuring interoperability and maximizing the effectiveness of security investments. Whether organizations operate in public, private, or hybrid cloud environments, Tufin offers the flexibility and scalability needed to adapt to evolving threats while maintaining robust security defenses.

The Good News

In the wake of the Cloud Breach Crisis, where nearly half of all breaches stem from cloud environments, it’s clear that organizations must take proactive steps to bolster their cloud security posture.

Tufin provides comprehensive support for leading public cloud support and access providers like Microsoft Azure and Palo Alto Prisma Access, ensuring organizations can leverage the full capabilities of Prisma Access and Microsoft Azure while maintaining robust security defenses and compliance standards.

Tufin’s support for Prisma Access offers streamlined policy management and visibility, enabling organizations to enforce consistent security policies across their network infrastructure. This integration enhances security posture and simplifies compliance efforts in hybrid-cloud environments.

Similarly, Tufin’s support for Microsoft Azure empowers organizations to extend their network security policies seamlessly into Azure deployments, ensuring consistent security controls and compliance across on-premises and cloud environments.

Through its comprehensive solutions, Tufin addresses the complexities of cloud security management, offering centralized visibility and control across hybrid cloud networks. Tufin also drives and fosters the principles of zero trust and least privilege, empowering organizations to securely navigate the complex cloud security landscape with confidence and resilience.