July 24, 2024 | By Zoey Zelmore
With any IT environment, especially the public cloud, security is a top concern and priority. When leveraging the public cloud, one of the most important steps to ensuring a protected environment is recognizing the shared responsibility model, as it delineates the security obligations between the cloud provider and your organization. While some protection is offered through your cloud provider, to create a truly robust and secure cloud footprint, your organization must procure additional security independently.
Today, we will cover the 4 most important reasons to implement firewalls into your security posture, and how they can impact the overall success of your cloud journey.
Enhanced Security: Public cloud providers such as AWS offer built-in security features, but with additional firewalls, your organization can add layers of protection from external threats with a barrier that prevents unauthorized access and cyber-attacks.
Custom Security Policies and Compliance Requirements: As mentioned, most providers offer build in protection, but these might not be sufficient for all organizations. Implementing your own firewalls adds an extra layer of security tailored to your specific needs, protecting against threats that the cloud provider’s default security measures might miss. Whether you prioritize HIPPA, PCI, GDPR, or other compliance requirements, implementing your own firewalls also allows you to ensure that you are not only safeguarded, but meeting business needs to ensure a streamlined and safe operation.
Segmentation and Isolation: Additional firewalls allow you to segment and isolate different parts of your network within the cloud, providing barriers and limiting access as assigned and permitted based on your organizational controls. This minimizes the risk of lateral movement by attackers and contains potential security breaches by limiting their impact on your infrastructure, and preventing outages and downtime that ensure business continuity.
Visibility and Control: By deploying additional firewalls, you gain better visibility and control over your network traffic and security events. This helps in identifying and responding to security incidents more effectively, and providing insights that might not be available through the cloud provider’s tools alone.
As you can see, firewalls play a vital role in securing public cloud environments by providing enhanced security, custom policy enforcement, compliance adherence, network segmentation, and greater visibility and control. Recognizing the importance of these safeguards ensures your cloud infrastructure is robust and resilient against evolving threats.
When exploring options for bolstering your cloud security, Opti9 can help you implement and manage comprehensive security solutions tailored to your specific needs. Through our partnership with Field Effect, we have developed an end to end security solution that allows for single pane of glass management, fully simplifying the way you protect your organization. Ready to learn more around how our advanced security offerings with Field Effect can protect your organization against threats? Book a demo with our team and get a free month to explore our Field Effect MDR offering!
