Shift Left and Increase Your Security Posture

[RPrasadi]

By Ben Nicholson

Prisma Cloud Ensures Your Cloud Applications are Secure from Code to Cloud

To stay relevant, organizations need to be nimble. They need to offer new services, new capabilities and transform their customers' experiences while managing the volatile world of cyber attackers. Moving to the cloud is now the way of achieving the first part of your goals.

But, what about securing the data, applications and tools to ensure you can go from building secure codes to delivering secure cloud applications? When you’re responsible for the secure operation of your cloud services, how do you ensure the transformation of your journey to the cloud?

You’ve probably heard that shifting left increases your applications’ security, helping to ensure they’re deployed to the cloud without vulnerabilities. How this is done, though, can be a mystery — one that I hope to shed light on with this post.

Shift Left — Code, Build, Deploy and Run

Step 1: Build Security Into Your Code and Build Cycles

Continuous integration (CI) is the development lifecycle practice that provides your organization with the ability to rapidly and continuously develop, update and maintain your cloud-based applications. Ensuring that your code is free from vulnerabilities, before going to the build stage, can be simplified with the right tools.

Using Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud scanning capabilities provides visibility and control within your code. And, it builds processes to identify vulnerabilities and compliance violations before progressing to the “deploy phase” of the application's lifecycle.

Step 2: Confidently Deploy Secure Applications

With modern automation, cloud applications are in a continuous cycle of development, testing and release, which introduces the fundamental challenge of continuous change. But, identifying vulnerabilities and compliance issues within applications that are staged for deployment helps prevent your applications from becoming targets of bad actors. Prisma Cloud helps enforce your policies to ensure only trusted applications are deployed in the cloud runtime environment.

Step 3: Monitor and Track Applications Running Across the Cloud Workload Continuum

Regardless of where it’s deployed (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, etc.), an application’s runtime actions should be monitored for abnormal behaviors. Prisma Cloud quickly identifies expected behaviors and prevents anomalous behavior. It secures runtime environments using predictive and threat-based protections.

Shifting left can be as simple as selecting a product designed to secure cloud applications in every step of your cloud applications’ code, build, deploy and run processes.

With built-in scanning capabilities, policy enforcement, predictive and threat-based protection, Prisma Cloud helps shift your security left, delivering the assurance that your cloud applications are highly secured.

To help configure, provision, deploy and gain the maximum benefit from Prisma Cloud, we recommend Prisma Cloud CBDR Adoption Guide, Prisma Cloud CBDR Adoption Workshop or QuickStart Service for Prisma Cloud Code Security, and shift left for optimum cloud application security.

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