Why Shift-Left and Shift-Right Security Are Both Essential in the Cloud Part 2: Get Your Shift Together

In Part 1 of our article, we explored the importance of both Shift-Left and Shift-Right security. In Part 2, we will discuss how integrating the proactive measures of Shift-Left Security with the reactive capabilities of Shift-Right Security enables organizations to achieve comprehensive security across the cloud lifecycle. This approach not only enhances protection at every stage but also creates vital checks and balances, fostering a seamless and resilient security strategy.

Get Your Shift Together:

Why Shift-Left and Shift-Right Security Work Better Together

Combining Shift-Left and Shift-Right Security creates a seamless security strategy that addresses both prevention and response. 

Here’s how these approaches complement each other:

1. Enhanced Visibility Across the Lifecycle

Shift-Left solutions like CSPM provide visibility into configurations and compliance during the development phase, while Shift-Right solutions like CDR ensure real-time monitoring of active workloads, detecting adversarial activity and defeating it. Together, they eliminate blind spots throughout the cloud lifecycle.

2. Faster Threat Detection and Mitigation

By integrating CSPM’s automated remediation capabilities with CDR’s real-time threat detection, organizations can rapidly identify and address vulnerabilities before they are exploited.

3. Comprehensive Risk Management

CSPM identifies misconfigurations and compliance gaps, while CDR provides insights into runtime threats and anomalies. This dual approach ensures comprehensive risk management across static and dynamic environments.

4. Improved Compliance and Reporting

CSPM ensures adherence to regulatory standards during deployment, and CDR provides detailed logs and evidence of threat detection and response activities. This unified strategy simplifies compliance reporting.

5. Vulnerable Image Management

While CSPM reports on vulnerable images, CDR determines which ones are actively used and provides compensating controls when full patching isn’t feasible. This targeted approach minimizes risks while maintaining operational efficiency.

Industries That Benefit from Shift-Left and Shift-Right Security

Shift-Left and Shift-Right Security methodologies are especially effective in industries that require stringent data privacy and security measures to protect assets and sensitive information. These include:

• Finance: Safeguarding financial transactions and customer data.

• Fintech: Ensuring security for innovative financial technologies and platforms.

• Technology Companies: Protecting intellectual property and software development processes.

• Data Warehouse Companies: Securing massive volumes of sensitive and structured data.

• Hospitals: Protecting patient records and adhering to HIPAA compliance.

• Any Industry Requiring Data Privacy and Security: Including government, legal, and retail sectors, where protecting assets and customer information is critical.

What Makes Spyderbat Stand Out Among Other CDR Solutions

Initial attempts by various vendors to offer comprehensive CDR created significant challenges for security teams:

1. Overwhelming them with alerts causing alert fatigue 

2. Generating a flood of false positives making it impossible to see the real danger

3. Implementing small detection windows that lack necessary context for accurate detection leading to missed attacks

4. Not providing any automated response capabilities resulting in a delayed response and consequent damages

5. Leaving the task of understanding and investigating each alert as an arduous manual exercise (digging through logs in an attempt to piece the story together) limiting the number of alerts a team can process

6. Repurposing traditional End-Point Detection and Response (EDR) solutions for cloud environments missing the essential cloud context of ephemeral containers and PODs and lacking the necessary detection logic to uncover more sophisticated cloud attack techniques. 

7. Impractical heavy agent designs that consume 10-25% of server resources making them prohibitively expensive to deploy.

These challenges have rendered most solutions useless as the workload generated far outpaced the value.  For Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) to be effective alerts need to focus your attention on what to respond to, and if you can't determine which alerts are legitimate you cannot prioritize your response. 

Spyderbat has pioneered a novel approach to CDR that addresses all of these challenges.

1. Detection accuracy that minimizes alerts by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude 

2. Automatic false positive elimination to ensure each alert generated is worthy of attention

3. A 90 day detection window (or more) to accurately detect more sophisticated adversaries

4. Automated responses that provide instant protection to intercept attackers by killing processes, connections or entire PODs

5. Automatically generated attack traces that provide a complete detailed story of the intruders actions for specific and complete remediation 

6. Purpose-built cloud solution designed to capture cloud context with specialized behavior-based detection logic to address the cloud attack landscape

7. A lightweight agent approach for fast and easy deployment with minimal to no impact on the cloud infrastructure resources

Spyderbat’s approach to Cloud and Kubernetes Detection and Response is built specifically for the dynamic and complex nature of modern cloud environments. Our solutions address the challenges outlined above by offering:

• Cloud-native design tailored for scalability and performance.

• Comprehensive visibility across ephemeral and persistent workloads.

• Lightweight, agentless monitoring to minimize resource consumption.

• Seamless integration with DevOps workflows to maintain agility.