After the long and tedious process of your Day 0 preparation and design – which includes countless hours of planning, testing, and recalibrating – comes the moment of truth.
No matter how much the team has tried to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s, there will always be something that comes up that is unanticipated or wasn’t accounted for.
And these unanticipated and unaccounted for moments bring security risk, even if they only exist for milliseconds before being corrected. Here are five security best practices to ensure the continual uptime of your platform and applications.
- Security Monitoring and Auditing. While you may have a separate security team in your IT organization, security starts with the SRE. With an understanding of how applications should behave, SREs are in the optimal position to recognize security anomalies versus performance glitches, collaborating with compliance and security teams as necessary.
- Secure Configuration Management. Ensure the maintenance of secure configurations across infrastructure, software, and network components by following hardening guidelines and compliance requirements to reduce your attack surface. This also includes auditing configuration changes, deployments, the encryption of sensitive data, removal of sensitive data in environmental variables, and proper management of secrets and credentials.
- Vulnerability Management. While SREs typically do not perform vulnerability scans or apply patches, there is a critical role for SREs in the overall vulnerability management for the environment. SREs should watch for the results of exploits, since often patching systems cannot ever keep up with vulnerabilities. Similarly, SREs are in a better position than security to identify and triage risk that stems from privilege escalation, credential theft, or other non CVE-related attacks and risks, since fingerprinting and signatures can’t help stop these kinds of identity-related threats.
- Access Control and Privilege Management. Related to the above, SREs can help to ensure that running environments are protected by the appropriate access controls , such as role-based access control (RBAC) and least privilege principles by regularly reviewing and auditing access rights, managing user accounts, and enforcing strong authentication mechanisms.
- Security Incident Post-Mortems. After security incidents occur, SREs should participate in post-incident reviews and post-mortems to understand the root causes and identify areas for improvement. Work with security teams (if applicable) to implement corrective actions, update security controls, and enhance monitoring to prevent similar incidents from occurring.
The Spyderbat Cloud Native Runtime Security platform is an SREs strongest ally during your Day 2 Operations, thanks to its key capabilities for preventing risks in runtime from becoming downtime:
- Scout accurately detects attacks in your cloud native environment by automatically chaining suspicious behaviors together. It recognizes tactics and techniques across MITRE’s Linux Framework, allowing you to exponentially reduce false positives and saving you precious time.
- Guardian prevents application drift in order to maximize uptime. It automatically generates known-good profiles of your complex workload behaviors and stops misconfigurations and new, evasive attacks. This enables fast and secure development and protection – no more tradeoffs.
- Flashback lets you visualize chained workload and user actions, helping you identify its source. WIth this feature, there’s no need to dig into logs so that you can get back to building automation. It immediately pinpoints and understands the root cause of security and operational concerns, helping shrink response times from days to mere minutes.
- Interceptor lets you take automated action , so that you can stop threats, block errors, and raise alerts to the right teams - in real time. As time is always of the essence, this minimizes response time with minimal interruptions, thanks in part to its low-friction integration into existing tooling.
With Spyderbat, continuous runtime protection is both simplified and within reach. It provides visibility and control for Day 2, giving you automatic guardrails that protect known-good processes, and stop anomalies that lead to outage, downtime, and risk.
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