In today’s cloud security landscape, the challenge of keeping pace with evolving threats is daunting for security practitioners. Meanwhile, malicious actors operate at lightning speed, often breaching organizations and extracting valuable data within minutes, if not seconds. Imagine what they could accomplish in 24 hours — can any modern organization afford such a gap in their cloud defenses?
The need for real-time visibility
Over the past few years, organizations all over the world have embarked on their cloud security journey by first gaining basic visibility into their cloud environments using Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM). These solutions help detect misconfigurations, compliance violations, and other risks in the cloud. However, CSPM typically offers only a snapshot of your security posture, scanning the cloud environment once every 24 hours — which means there are visibility gaps between scans.
In dynamic and complex cloud environments, ephemeral workloads are continuously deployed, modified, stopped, and restarted. In response to shifting business needs, developers can launch, configure, and scale workloads in and out as often as a dozen times a day. Changes, big and small, occur all the time, which might and, most probably, will affect your risk posture. In conditions like these, relying solely on once-a-day scans for security is like using yesterday’s weather forecast to decide what to wear today.
On top of this, in the current threat landscape, you can’t afford to wait the whole day to find out about a critical misconfiguration that might expose you to an attack. Not to mention the rising speed of cloud attacks: according to Aqua Nautilus data, today threat actors can scan the entire internet in just one hour. Moreover, they are constantly evolving their techniques to fly under the radar and avoid detection for as long as possible.
This is why we’ve built Event-based Scanning — which detects any changes to your cloud resources at the time they are made.
Introducing Event-based Scanning
Today, Aqua has released Event-based Scanning to bolster its CSPM capabilities and deliver real-time insights. This new feature is designed to help security teams overcome cloud visibility gaps – it will identify new cloud resources and misconfigurations as they are created, in between scheduled scans, and immediately update your cloud inventory.
How does it work? In the background, Aqua leverages cloud provider logs to capture “events” (i.e., any changes to your cloud resources), such as creation of a new resource, configuration change, deletion of the resource, and so on. Once Aqua identifies a new resource, it runs a micro-scan of that resource to check for any issues and risks. Then, we feed this information to the platform and update your cloud inventory accordingly.
What are the benefits for you as a security practitioner?
- An always up-to-date inventory of resources across multiple clouds and accounts
- An accurate view of your security posture at any time
- A more reliable source of truth versus scheduled scans
- Faster risk detection and remediation – since cloud resources are scanned as soon as they’re created or modified, overstretched security teams can address and mitigate any issues faster.
In practice, this makes a huge difference for security teams and signifies a new, better approach to consuming CSPM insights. As your cloud inventory becomes the real source of truth, you no longer need to run scheduled scans as often and can reduce their frequency to a minimum.
Event-based Scanning ensures that teams have comprehensive visibility into their cloud environments and can address critical risks fast. With an up-to-date inventory of cloud resources, you can efficiently investigate and resolve issues, saving time and costs. Moreover, there’s no need to wait for the next scheduled scan to see applied fixes in action—they will appear immediately.
Event-based Scanning in action
Let’s now look at how Event-based Scanning works. After we create a new S3 bucket in the AWS console, it quickly appears in our inventory along with all its misconfigurations:
Newly created S3 bucket and its misconfigurations shown in Inventory
Normally, this would come up in your inventory only after the next scheduled scan, which could take up to 24H. Now, it’s updated almost immediately.
To see Event-based Scanning in action, check out our short demo video:
Navigating cloud risks efficiently with Aqua CNAPP
Cloud environments will continue to grow, further increasing complexity, spanning multiple cloud providers, a multitude of services, numerous cloud accounts and configuration options within a single organization. The simple truth is that anything less than real-time visibility is insufficient for the dynamic nature of the cloud.
To fortify your organization’s defense, Aqua has enhanced its CSPM capabilities with robust Event-based Scanning, which detects new cloud resources and misconfigurations in real time, ensuring that you maintain an accurate view of your security posture at all times.
Aqua CSPM is an integral part of the most comprehensive Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) on the market, which delivers enterprise-grade protection across the entire cloud native application lifecycle, unifying software supply chain security, posture management, and intelligence-driven runtime protection in one single source of truth.
To learn more about Aqua CNAPP, download a solution sheet or book a demo with our cloud security experts to see it in action.