4 Ways Your Cloud Perimeter Security Could Be at Risk—and How to Avoid Them

Moving from an on-premises network to cloud networking is a seismic shift: it changes every aspect of design and management, especially security. While the cloud offers radical security benefits compared to on-premises environments, the threat landscape is vast. Your attack surface increases from a physical office environment to every location in your distributed network. Network entry points multiply drastically. And now that you’re essentially renting storage and computing from cloud providers, many of the tools you previously used to monitor and secure your network are no longer available. Your network perimeter is vulnerable to a host of external threats and internal risks.

Cloud Providers’ Native Security Options Fail to Protect Your Cloud Perimeter

Many organizations who transition to the cloud hope that the default cloud network security features offered by cloud providers will be enough. They aren’t. These native solutions leave critical gaps that threat actors can exploit and human error can expose, and their billing mechanisms add up to outrageous costs. The basic security options offered by cloud platforms can leave your network exposed. Here are some challenges you might face if you rely solely on the default options.

1. Weak security for outbound traffic

Cloud providers’ native NAT gateways provide only the most basic security: blocking inbound connections. They don’t provide any control or insight into outbound traffic, such as advanced filtering or deep packet inspection. Without a secure egress option, your network is vulnerable to malicious traffic and attacks. For example, a malicious actor who has accessed a server through any number of protocol stack or web framework vulnerabilities can exfiltrate sensitive data from that server. Once they’re in, they’re in — through lateral movement, they can access data from other servers connected to that first one and wreak havoc.

2. Limited visibility and control over cloud network traffic

Cloud providers are responsible for managing and securing data across many customers, which forces them to limit the visibility and control they offer to networking teams. This restriction is designed to minimize operational risks, as granting customers deep access to the underlying infrastructure could compromise security.

However, this shift can be frustrating for networking teams that previously had full control over their on-premises data center networks. In the cloud, they are now faced with limited options for monitoring and managing their networks, which can introduce security risks. Without granular access to data from APIs or detailed traffic flows, these teams struggle to analyze traffic patterns, assess threats, and troubleshoot issues, making it harder to respond effectively to potential security incidents.

3. Compliance challenges

Organizations bound by strict compliance standards such as HIPAA, SOX, and GDPR must uphold stringent audit trails and enforce robust security controls to meet regulatory requirements. Cobbling together logging data from cloud platforms can be time-consuming and expensive, as you often incur additional costs to parse the data into the format you need to present to regulatory bodies. The resulting delay can leave you with longer audit cycles, more overhead expenses, and in worst-case scenarios, a frustrating and expensive network redesign. While many organizations integrate third-party security tools to fill the gaps in their network, adding those solutions can complicate your network further.

4. Crippling costs

Cloud provider NAT gateways work on a dual-pricing model, charging for both the time the gateway is active and the amount of data processed through it. In other words, the more throughput you use, the higher your monthly cost. Since you have no mechanisms to selectively block traffic, you have no way of limiting or predicting these costs, making it almost impossible to maintain a budget or forecast accurately.

A Better Solution: Aviatrix Cloud Firewall

To empower companies to meet the needs of this new and borderless cloud world, Aviatrix has designed a solution that overcomes the limitations of cloud provider security options, protecting your cloud perimeter while simplifying your network architecture. With Aviatrix Cloud Firewall, you can centrally manage and observe your distributed cloud perimeter, more easily comply with regulatory frameworks, and achieve hard cost savings with flat-rate billing.

To give you an easy way to fortify your network without redesigning from scratch, we’ve designed three bundles for this solution: CPS Essentials, CPS Core, and CPS Core Plus. Each bundle offers game-changing capabilities for advanced visibility, security, and policy enforcement.

These bundles are designed to optimize your security while removing unpleasant surprises from pricing:

• Best-in-class security – Safeguard your cloud perimeter with robust capabilities including URL filtering, geo-blocking, geolocation-based monitoring, advanced threat detection, and network segmentation. This solution helps you achieve Zero Trust control by automatically baselining and recommending Internet egress security policies as well as streamlining monitoring and management. Aviatrix Cloud Firewall is cloud native and supports multicloud and hybrid cloud environments, simplifying operational complexity while fortifying every aspect of your network design.

• Total visibility – Gain granular visibility into your entire network, including comprehensive insights into traffic patterns, anomaly detection, and cost analysis. Aviatrix Cloud Firewall offers advanced telemetry and monitoring capabilities that empower you to stop problems before they occur, decreasing your mean time to resolution (MTTR). These visibility and troubleshooting capabilities help you ensure one of the key metrics of network success: reliability.

• Regulatory compliance – Meet all your compliance requirements with deep visibility into egress traffic, automation to quickly deploy compliant environments, and detailed logging to help you rapidly assess and troubleshoot. Centralized management & observability makes it a breeze to gather data, set your policies, and outline the processes you need to show for compliance certifications.

• Cost transparency – Flat-rate billing, unlike metering, offers an “all-you-can-eat” model with no additional throughput costs giving you clear insight into your billing. Why settle for unpredictable expenses when you can have clarity? Plus, you could pocket 25% in savings or more compared to first-party NAT gateway solutions.

The best part? These bundles offer a 45% discount through January 2025.

Cloud Perimeter Security That’s Simple, Comprehensive, and Cost-Effective

The Aviatrix Cloud Firewall Solution offers a streamlined, all-encompassing, and budget-friendly approach to protecting your valuable data while maintaining the trust of your partners, vendors, and customers. Learn more or trial the solution.