What is Code to Cloud?
Everyone is in the cloud, and the adoption of DevOps tools have enabled organizations to deploy cloud infrastructure and resources at a scale and speed not previously possible. To reduce risk in these complex and dynamic environments, security teams are increasingly adopting a Code to Cloud security approach to proactively prevent risks from reaching production, and for those that do, increase the speed at which they are remediated.
Code to Cloud is a security approach that integrates security at every stage of an application’s lifecycle. It can be grouped into two main categories:
- Securing code in the development phase to ensure problematic code is identified and addressed before being deployed to cloud production environments e.g. through code scanning.
- For those issues that do reach production, being able to trace those risks back to the specific lines of code that introduced them to ensure the root cause is identified, and remediation is precise and efficient.
Key Aspects of Code to Cloud Worth Mentioning
- Secure code development/ensuring secure coding practices
- Secure CI/CD Pipelines (SAST and DAST)
- Runtime protection (CWPP, CNAPP, CSPM)
- Vulnerability management / continuous monitoring
- Risk remediation and mitigation
Code to Cloud for Faster Remediation
Security teams are becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of security findings coming from a number of different security platforms including vulnerability management, application security, and cloud security platforms, such as CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platform), CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management), and CNAPP (Cloud Native Application Protection Platform). These alerts frequently lack context, making it difficult to prioritize and efficiently remediate and mitigate risks, resulting in a growing backlog of cloud vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
At the same time, threat actors are using advanced technologies like AI to identify weaknesses in an organization’s environment to exploit vulnerabilities at a faster pace than ever before. To reduce the impact and volume of successful exploitation attempts, Code to Cloud strategies enable security teams to expedite remediation and improve their vulnerability management program. These types of capabilities can be used to handle CVEs, zero day vulnerabilities, and oftentimes cloud misconfigurations.
Key Capabilities
Integration with Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Leveraging the power of DevOps tools to streamline the process of identifying how security issues were introduced improves both the speed and precision of remediation. By using the same tools that introduced the problem to fix it, security and DevOps teams can collaborate more effectively, reducing the manual effort required to remediate risks.
Understanding Cloud Security Policies
Correlating findings coming from cloud security platforms (e.g. CSPM) with existing organizational guardrails ensures that risks already mitigated by existing policies are excluded, reducing the likelihood of false positives. This approach saves valuable time and resources, while ensuring attention is focused on true critical and high priority issues.
Automation
Today, remediating a single cloud security risk often takes organizations more than 30 days. Automation plays a big role in reducing Mean Time to Remediation (MTTR) and addressing issues before attackers can exploit them. By automating manual tasks like risk validation and code review, security teams can quickly trace problems back to the exact lines of code that introduced them, pinpointing root causes with precision.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI and Agentic AI can uplevel security teams and handle more complex tasks that can’t be simply automated. A key application of AI is to generate replacement code to resolve issues. AI also enhances alert enrichment, prioritization, and grouping of findings, among other tasks, such as aligning risks to resolution paths, to improve overall efficiency in the remediation process.
Key Benefits
Greater Context for Risk Prioritization
To efficiently remediate risks, security teams require context: To not only understand which risks should be accepted and which risks should be prioritized and fixed now, but to also understand the best path to remediation. Critical questions that need to be answered during the remediation process include: Are the impacted assets managed or unmanaged? Which DevOps platform was used to deploy the problematic code? What specific lines of code caused the problem? How and where should I fix the problem? Understanding answers to these questions in minutes versus days is key.
Accelerated Remediation
Gaining visibility into what DevOps actually manages, where and how, drastically speeds up the process of tracing open issues back to their origins and enables security teams to provide ready-to-implement fixes to DevOps, increasing the speed at which problems can be resolved.
Increased Fix Precision & Prevent Risks from Resurfacing
Fixing problems directly in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables a more precise fix, addressing the root cause of the problem. Further, it is the best way to reduce the risk of the same risks resurfacing – which is a common challenge. In cloud environments, where changes are often made in the cloud console or implemented manually and then overridden by DevOps systems or existing cloud policies.
Meet DevOps Where They Are
Security and DevOps teams often work in silos, slowing down remediation. Integrating security into the same workflows and tools DevOps teams use eliminates the endless back and forth between teams to research and implement the right solution.
How ZEST Can Help
ZEST Security is redefining cloud risk remediation and mitigation using Agentic AI, DevOps tools, and Open Source technologies. The platform enables security teams to streamline cloud security prioritization, root cause identification, and risk resolution. The platform can be deployed in minutes, natively integrating with cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), cloud security solutions (e.g., CNAPP), and the most popular DevOps systems including Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi and ARM. Interested in learning more? Contact our team.
