How a Serverless Architecture Can Help You Secure Cloud-Native Applications

Cybersecurity teams often struggle with securing cloud-native applications, which are becoming increasingly popular with developers. The good news is that deploying these applications on a serverless architecture can make it easier to protect them. Here’s why.

Cloud-native architecture has opened up new avenues for developers, bringing individual components out of monolithic server configurations and making them readily available as consumable services. As such, organizations have responded by moving to the cloud at a pace previously unseen. Taking advantage of these consumable services can decrease development time, maintenance overhead, and cost.

However, it can be challenging to protect cloud-native applications that leverage serverless functions like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions and Azure App Service. In this article, we’ll discuss what a serverless architecture is and how it can help you secure cloud-native applications.

What is serverless?

A serverless architecture lets organizations build specific functional components of an application without having to maintain individual servers. Instead, the application runs on cloud services that are managed and maintained by the cloud service provider. The functions are simply snippets of code that are deployed into the environment. That means that the cloud provider handles all of the infrastructure required to run these components, allowing developers to focus on the core functionality of the application rather than on how the server is maintained and secured. Additionally, a serverless architecture allows for increased scalability, improved performance and cost savings in many cases. 

How can serverless help?

A serverless architecture can help secure functional components by taking advantage of inherent features, as well as specific security features offered by the cloud provider. These serverless architecture features include:

Isolation and reduced attack surface: Cloud functions eliminate the need to manage individual servers. This in turn eliminates the need for organizations to patch servers and maintain security updates. Serverless functions often run within containers in the cloud provider’s infrastructure, so that infrastructure is already managed by the provider. The containers are isolated from other processes and therefore won’t impact other serverless functions or even the host operating systems, both in terms of security and resource allocation.

Event-driven execution: With serverless, code is only executed in response to specific events, such as an API call, a message in a queue, or a change in a database. This means that the function is only active and accessible when it needs to be, which can help in additional reduction in the attack surface.

Automatic scaling: In addition to ‌event-driven execution, serverless functions allow developers to automatically scale up/down the number of instances in response to incoming traffic. This means that the initial deployment can be configured so that if the application receives a large number of requests, the service can automatically spin up more instances of the application component to handle the increased load. Similarly, if the application receives fewer requests, the deployment configuration can be used to spin down the application to the desired state. This auto-scaling functionality can save costs, but it also ensures that performance of the application remains stable all while seamlessly allowing for the increase in traffic.

Access control: Cloud environments allow administrators to grant or deny access to cloud functions based on the identity of the user. This helps ensure that only authorized users have access, and allows for more direct control over who can make changes or invoke the functions. Solutions like just-in-time access take this a step further by governing access on an ongoing basis and eliminating standing privileges. Following principles such as least privilege and role-based access control can be easily performed in the identity management environment for each provider. 

Data encryption: Serverless functions allow developers to configure data encryption at-rest and in-transit using a cloud service provider’s key management service (KMS). This helps protect sensitive information from unauthorized access. Data encryption is an important security measure for any organization, especially when dealing with sensitive customer or financial information.

Additional security and configuration management tools: Most cloud service providers offer security tools and services that can be used in conjunction with serverless architectures to improve security. These tools can help to detect security issues and to take action to remediate them quickly and/or automatically. They can also help ensure that the desired state is maintained by applying secure configurations across every deployment in a uniform way. 

Cost: The cost of deploying specific components of an application using traditional methods may involve the hosting of a server (or the internal cost of purchasing the server itself), as well as all of the licensing for operating systems, individual security products, and configuration tools layered on top. However, when moving to a serverless architecture, the cost is based on the number of times the function is executed or the amount of data that it’s used to transmit. When taking all of these into account, the cost per value of a serverless architecture may help reduce the overall cost of application functionality, as well as help reduce the cost of labor of the traditional model.

Summary

A serverless architecture can simplify and secure a functional component for a given application. It allows developers to focus on the development of their application, while the service provider takes care of the underlying infrastructure. Access controls are made available so that access to serverless functions can be granted as needed. A serverless architecture also provides scalability, cost savings, and improved performance. With the modern cloud-native development model, organizations can quickly deploy applications with minimal effort and cost, while ensuring that the application is both secure and reliable.

How Tenable can help

Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms like Tenable Cloud Security help ensure that access to cloud environments is properly secured. Tenable Cloud Security can identify overly permissive access and provide remediation suggestions to tighten security around these resources. Tenable Cloud Security can also provide multi-cloud governance along with additional controls and reporting, all in one unified environment.

For more information, please visit the main Tenable Cloud Security page.