Contributing Author: Arun Solleti, Solution Manager

As cloud deployments continue to grow and evolve, organizations must make securing these environments a top priority. However, traditional security approaches—combined with modern service ownership models—frequently created friction across teams, with conflicting priorities and competing objectives hampering effective risk mitigation and incident response efforts.

To tackle this challenge head-on, AHEAD and Wiz have created the AHEAD Cloud Security Accelerator – a powerful solution that combines comprehensive visibility into critical cloud attack paths with automated workflows tailored for swift and scalable remediation. This potent combination of Wiz’s cutting-edge features and AHEAD’s deep expertise improves organizations’ cloud security posture while enhancing the efficiency of security operations across different teams. In this article, we’ll explore the most frequent challenges to cloud security and the unique solutions provided by our Cloud Security Accelerator.

Common Challenges to Cloud Security

While there are a wide range of potential roadblocks and pitfalls facing enterprises regarding cloud security, the most frequent challenges include:

• Lack of Visibility:
  • Organizations are constantly facing the challenge to maintain visibility and accurately prioritize true risks across cloud environments, where workloads and configurations are always changing. This makes it difficult for them to understand their attack surface and effectively prioritize mitigation efforts.

• Unmitigated Risks:
  • Failure to promptly identify and diminish security vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, secrets, etc. can result in unauthorized access to sensitive data or lateral movement, leading to data exfiltration, compliance violations, and monetary loss.

• Monitoring & Auditing Shortfalls:
  • A lack of comprehensive monitoring and auditing capabilities for cloud deployments increases the likelihood of security breaches going undetected, thus creating more risk for the organization and weakening overall security of the cloud.

• Siloed Processes & Tools:
  • Disparate security processes and tools prevent organizations from gaining a complete picture of their cloud security, leading to a more reactive security posture.

Closing Cloud Security Gaps

AHEAD’s Cloud Security Accelerator, powered by Wiz, addresses these challenges by providing a comprehensive and integrated approach to securing cloud environments. The solution offers the following key benefits:

• Precise Identification of Security Posture Deviations:
  • By leveraging industry-leading security intelligence and best practices, accurately identify deviations from security standards, misconfigurations, and potential vulnerabilities across your cloud environments.

• Robust Mitigation of Risk:
  • Detects security risks and provides actionable recommendations and automated remediation capabilities to mitigate identified vulnerabilities, secrets and misconfigurations, reducing your overall risk exposure.

• Comprehensive Auditing of Development & Deployment Landscapes:
  • Performs deep scans and audits of your entire cloud infrastructure, including cloud services, applications, and configurations. This provides a complete and up-to-date view of your cloud security posture.

• Streamlined Processes:
  • Assists in consolidating siloed process and tools by implementing a unified cloud security posture platform, built on Wiz technology, which standardizes processes, fosters cross-functional collaboration and streamlines security mitigation from development to deployment.

Stronger Security Leads to Better Outcomes

By implementing AHEAD’s Cloud Security Accelerator, organizations can achieve the following key business outcomes:

Establish End-to-End Security Posture

Diminish your risk exposure across by providing visibility and control throughout the entire cloud infrastructure lifecycle. From development to deployment, our solution helps organizations establish a robust end-to-end security posture, minimizing risk exposure at every stage.

Enable Proactive Detection & Remediation of Security Vulnerabilities

Through continuous monitoring and auditing your cloud environments, proactively identify and remediate security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, reducing the risk of cyber-attacks and data breaches.

Streamline Compliance with Regulations & Best Practices

Comprehensive security intelligence and automated reporting capabilities allow you to streamline your compliance efforts, ensuring adherence to industry regulations and internal security policies.

The AHEAD + Wiz Advantage

• Comprehensive Assessments – Leverage AHEAD’s comprehensive cloud security assessments, drawing upon our extensive expertise to gain an understanding of your current security posture.
• Organizational Alignment – Utilize AHEAD’s Enterprise Cloud Operating Model (ECOM) to align people, processes, and skills and identify key gaps with industry best practices and compliance requirements.
• Roadmap & Prioritized Backlog – Drawing from identified gaps, AHEAD develops an actionable roadmap and prioritized backlog to strengthen security posture while aligning with business objectives.
• Professional Services to Execute – AHEAD’s skilled cybersecurity engineers, fully trained on Wiz capabilities, will design, deploy, and integrate the identified roadmap.
• Managed Services – Offload continuous security monitoring, maintenance, and management to AHEAD’s 24/7 security operations center (SOC).

The Next Step in Your Cloud Security Journey

The Cloud Security Accelerator empowers organizations to take control of their cloud security posture, mitigate risks, and achieve compliance, ultimately enabling them to confidently leverage the power of cloud computing while maintaining a secure and resilient IT environment.

Get in touch with AHEAD today to learn more.