Cloud Security Governance
Cloud Security Governance is the framework of policies, procedures, and controls that an organization establishes to manage its security and risk posture for data, applications, and infrastructure hosted in cloud environments (public, private, or hybrid).
In the context of cybersecurity, it's the structure and discipline that ensures an organization's cloud use aligns with its overall business goals, legal and regulatory requirements, and internal risk tolerance. It's less about the technical security controls themselves (like firewalls or encryption) and more about the rules, roles, and oversight that dictate how those controls are defined, implemented, monitored, and enforced.
Key Components of Cloud Security Governance
Cloud Security Governance is typically built upon several integrated components:
1. Strategy and Policy Definition:
Defining clear security policies and standards specifically tailored to the cloud operating model (e.g., how data must be classified and encrypted in the cloud).
Establishing the security strategy that aligns cloud risk management with the organization's business objectives.
Explicitly defining the Shared Responsibility Model to clarify which security tasks the cloud consumer is responsible for (e.g., data encryption) versus those the cloud service provider (CSP) is responsible for (e.g., physical security of the data center).
2. Organization and Accountability (Roles & Responsibilities):
Creating a governance team or Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) with representatives from security, IT, compliance, and business units.
Assigning clear roles, responsibilities, and accountability for security controls and risk management across the cloud estate. This is crucial given the distributed nature of cloud operations.
3. Risk Management:
Conducting regular, cloud-specific risk assessments to identify threats and vulnerabilities (like misconfigurations).
Implementing risk mitigation strategies (controls) and defining the organization's risk appetite for cloud usage.
Establishing a process for vetting and approving new cloud services and providers.
4. Compliance and Regulatory Alignment:
Ensuring the cloud environment adheres to all relevant external regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS) and internal corporate policies.
Implementing processes for continuous compliance monitoring and reporting to detect and remediate policy violations quickly.
5. Security Operations Oversight:
Setting standards for Identity and Access Management (IAM), including Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and the principle of least privilege.
Defining protocols for Incident Response and Disaster Recovery within the cloud context.
Mandating continuous security monitoring and auditing (often use Cloud Security Posture Management or CSPM tools) to maintain an accurate security status.
Importance in the Cloud Environment
Governance is especially vital in the cloud because:
Shared Responsibility: The cloud introduces a Shared Responsibility Model, in which security responsibilities are split between the CSP and the customer. Governance defines this split, ensuring no security areas are overlooked.
Dynamic Nature: Cloud environments are highly dynamic, provisioned, and changed rapidly. Governance provides the guardrails (often automated) to ensure that this speed and agility don't introduce unmanaged risk or misconfigurations.
Scale and Complexity: Organizations often use multiple cloud services and providers (multi-cloud), increasing complexity. A unified governance framework ensures consistent security standards across these diverse environments.
Shadow IT Prevention: Governance provides clear, approved paths for teams to access cloud resources securely and efficiently, thereby reducing the risk of Shadow IT (unauthorized cloud use).
Cloud Security Governance requires comprehensive visibility into an organization's external attack surface and associated risks. ThreatNG, as an all-in-one external attack surface management, digital risk protection, and security ratings solution, provides the necessary data and mechanisms to establish and enforce this governance from the perspective of an unauthenticated attacker.
The Role of ThreatNG in Cloud Security Governance
ThreatNG supports Cloud Security Governance across core functions:
1. External Discovery
ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery to map the organization's entire digital footprint. For cloud security, this means identifying all internet-facing assets owned by the organization and ensuring governance policies cover the full scope of cloud use, including potentially forgotten or shadow IT assets.
2. External Assessment and Security Ratings
A core function of governance is risk assessment. ThreatNG translates external vulnerabilities into quantifiable Security Ratings (A-F, with A being good and F being bad). These ratings act as clear, measurable governance metrics.
Detailed assessment examples directly relevant to cloud governance include:
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: This checks for the critical "dangling DNS" state, which is a significant cloud security governance failure. ThreatNG identifies subdomains using CNAME records pointing to unclaimed third-party services. It cross-references these against a comprehensive Vendor List that includes central cloud, PaaS, and CDN services such as AWS/S3, CloudFront, Microsoft Azure, Heroku, and Vercel. If a match is found and the resource is inactive or unclaimed, it confirms the susceptibility and prioritizes the risk. This directly enforces the governance policy that requires proper decommissioning of cloud resources.
Cyber Risk Exposure: This rating highlights misconfigured cloud security settings. It looks for Cloud Exposure (exposed open cloud buckets), indicating a breakdown in access control governance. It also checks for issues in Subdomain Intelligence, such as exposed ports, private IPs, and missing security headers, including Content-Security-Policy and HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS), which are mandatory configuration controls mandated by security governance.
Data Leak Susceptibility: This rating is specifically derived from risks like Cloud Exposure (specifically exposed open cloud buckets), and Externally Identifiable SaaS applications. Open cloud buckets are a direct governance failure, and identifying all external SaaS applications is essential for enforcing data residency and access policies.
Supply Chain & Third-Party Exposure: This is crucial for cloud governance, as it assesses risks posed by third-party vendors whose services are used. It identifies vendors from Domain Name Record Analysis, SaaS Identification, and Subdomains. This ensures governance reviews cover external cloud and SaaS providers identified through the attack surface.
3. Reporting and Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG provides continuous monitoring of the external attack surface and security ratings. This addresses the governance need for ongoing oversight rather than periodic checks. Its reporting capabilities generate Executive and Technical Reports, including a Prioritized list of risks (High, Medium, Low). Crucially, it provides External GRC Assessment Mappings for major frameworks such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, NIST CSF, and POPIA, allowing security leaders to report on compliance with governance mandates directly.
4. Investigation Modules
The investigation modules provide the depth needed to understand and validate specific governance violations:
Subdomain Intelligence: Beyond takeover checks, this module uncovers subdomains hosted on platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. For example, it might identify a subdomain sponsored on Heroku or a marketing subdomain hosted on Unbounce that returns an empty HTTP response or exposes a port. This allows the governance team to confirm unauthorized vendor use or a security misconfiguration.
Cloud and SaaS Exposure: This module directly identifies Sanctioned and Unsanctioned Cloud Services, including Open Exposed Cloud Buckets. For instance, a governance policy might allow Salesforce (CRM) but forbid the use of Monday.com (Work OS). This module will flag the use of the unsanctioned service, enabling immediate remediation and policy enforcement.
Code Repository Exposure: This module discovers public code repositories and can uncover digital risks, such as exposed AWS Access Key IDs, API Keys (e.g., Stripe, Google Cloud), and configuration files. The governance mandate for developers is never to commit secrets; the module provides direct evidence of a failure in this policy.
5. Intelligence Repositories
The DarCache repositories provide the necessary threat context for risk-based governance and prioritization.
DarCache Vulnerability (NVD, EPSS, KEV, eXploit): This holistic view of vulnerabilities allows the governance team to enforce a risk-based patching policy. Instead of patching everything, they can mandate priority for vulnerabilities listed on KEV (actively exploited in the wild) or those with a high EPSS (probabilistic likelihood of exploitation), ensuring resources are used effectively to mitigate the most pressing risks.
DarCache Compromised Credentials (Rupture) & Dark Web: Finding compromised credentials in these repositories triggers the governance policy for mandatory password rotation or MFA enforcement across relevant cloud systems.
DarCache ESG Violations: This provides the necessary context for governance teams managing corporate and regulatory risk by tracking publicly disclosed violations across areas such as Competition and Safety.
Working with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's external, unauthenticated view makes its insights highly valuable for cooperation with an organization's internal security and governance tools.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) / Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR): ThreatNG's prioritized findings and confirmed attacks (e.g., a dangling DNS confirmed with specific validation) could be fed into a SIEM for logging or a SOAR solution for automated remediation. For example, the discovery of a known vulnerability on a subdomain could trigger an automated workflow in the SOAR to open a high-priority ticket in the internal IT ticketing system.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM): While ThreatNG detects exposed cloud assets from the outside (e.g., open cloud buckets), a CSPM provides granular, authenticated internal checks. ThreatNG's alert on an exposed AWS or Microsoft Azure resource can validate a finding that the internal CSPM may already have flagged as a misconfiguration, providing external proof of the risk to the governance board.
Vulnerability and Risk Management Platforms: ThreatNG's correlation of raw findings with MITRE ATT&CK techniques (Initial Access, Persistence) provides a strategic layer of intelligence. This is a business-context prioritization that can be integrated with an internal vulnerability management platform to override purely technical CVSS scores with a real-world, externally validated exploitation likelihood (KEV, EPSS), better informing the governance decision on resource allocation.
Example of ThreatNG Helping Governance:
ThreatNG assesses a newly discovered subdomain, support.mycompany.com, and gives it an F security rating for Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility. The Subdomain Intelligence investigation module confirms the CNAME record points to an inactive external service on the Zendesk platform. This finding is then mapped in the External GRC Assessment to a failure in PCI DSS Requirement 2.2 (secure configuration standards). The Reporting feature generates an executive summary, allowing the CISO to present the "F" rating and the clear GRC violation to the board, which immediately enforces the governance decision to reclaim the dangling DNS entry and mitigate the critical risk.
