While leading public clouds provide foundational security capabilities, organizations often find gaps in visibility, advanced threat detection, compliance controls, and cross-environment management. Addressing these shortcomings typically requires integrating third-party security tools.
In this guide, we’ll provide a framework for evaluating cloud security needs, mapping offerings to gaps, setting selection criteria, and ultimately choosing complementary security solutions tailored to your environment.
Assessing Security Gaps
The first step is objectively assessing where the native security services from your cloud provider(s) fall short of fully meeting business requirements:
Policy Management
- Is identity and access management too decentralized or lack contextual controls?
- Can you enforce consistent data protection rules across services?
- Do you have visibility gaps into assets, configurations and user activity?
Threat Protection
- Are controls limited to known signatures rather than behavioral anomaly detection?
- Can you monitor cloud inter-communications and service dependencies?
- Are there gaps tracking lateral movement between cloud assets?
Compliance and Data Management
- Does the provider fully address data sovereignty needs for your regions?
- Are you lacking data lifecycle controls and retention for compliance?
- Can you identify sensitive data at rest and redact fields prior to exposure?
Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Visibility
- Do native tools provide unified visibility spanning on-prem, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud?
- Can you baseline security across centralized and federated cloud teams?
- Are there policy disconnects between interconnected cloud services?
Be realistic about the limitations of relying solely on embedded cloud security services. Prioritize gaps that would expose the business to financial, reputational or operational risk if exploited by attackers.
Mapping Offerings to Gaps
Once priority gaps are confirmed, analyze third-party security offerings to determine matches.
Capability Mapping Process:
- Maintain a catalog of security needs from gap assessment
- Organize needs by category like data security, IAM controls, etc
- Research security solutions with cloud security use cases
- Map supported features to cataloged requirements
- Determine which vendors solve the most critical gaps
- Prioritize must-have needs over nice-to-have
Focus specifically on tools purpose-built to enhance public cloud versus retrofitted on-prem products. Look for security analytics, posture management, CASB, CWPP, and zero trust access offerings designed cloud-first.
Ensure features seamlessly support leading public clouds like AWS, Azure and GCP with pre-built integrations for IAM, APIs, and other services.
Defining Selection Criteria
With gap-solution mapping complete, establish standardized technical and business criteria for selecting security products:
Security Capabilities
- Breadth of critical security controls addressed
- Flexible deployment models – agent, proxy, API, etc.
- Automation integration for workflows like SOARs
- Contextual and risk-based policy engines
Management & Operations
- Centralized policy definition and enforcement
- Unified visibility across on-prem, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud
- Intuitive graphical dashboards and drill-downs
- Built-in compliance frameworks and reporting
Admin & End User Experience
- Easy policy administration without extensive security expertise
- Minimal impact to cloud operations and velocity
- Actionable insights for infrastructure and DevOps teams
- Limited false positives disrupting user productivity
Total Cost of Ownership
- Price model aligns to cloud consumption growth
- Limited professional services required for setup and maintenance
- Consolidated data platform minimizing infra footprint
Apply weights to these evaluation criteria based on business priorities for your selection process.
Comparing Options
With requirements matched to solutions and weighted selection criteria defined, evaluate leading options head-to-head:
- Chart how each vendor fulfills defined technical, security and operations needs
- Rate solution usability and enterprise readiness
- Estimate total cost across multi-year timeframes
- Assess deployment complexity for integrations and maintenance
Validate evaluations through in-depth discussions, demos, trials, and reference customers for realistic feedback.
Focus on identifying one or two market leaders that align closest to your must-have versus nice-to-have priorities for cost-efficient security.
Keys for Successful Adoption
Follow these best practices when onboarding new third-party security tools to maximize value:
- Phase deployments to proving critical use cases first
- Ensure technical compatibility with existing cloud environments
- Set policies to recommended defaults, tuning over time
- Integrate with admin workflows like SIEM alerting and ticket creation
- Baseline security metrics pre and post deployment
- Provide admin training and run book documentation
- Goal should be simplifying cloud security, not increasing complexity
The public cloud shifts security responsibilities to customers. Mature solutions are essential to effectively manage risk. Carefully assessing gaps, defining must-have capabilities, and standardizing objective selection criteria steers organizations to the best fit.
