The era of on-premises infrastructure is quickly becoming a thing of the past, with research from Pluralsight showing that over 90% of organizations now leverage the cloud. What’s driving the even faster shift over the last few years? Consider AWS's foray into generative AI programs and agents for cloud migrations that promise unprecedented speed and efficiency. The idea is that AI-driven tools could analyze your on-premises infrastructure, automatically generate migration plans, and even assist with code conversion. This can significantly shorten development timelines and reduce manual effort, and those efficiencies are enticing for all types of organizations.
To get to this cloud-first world, many businesses are now focused on optimizing and re-platforming their existing cloud estates. It’s no longer about simply migrating from on-prem to the cloud, but about moving workloads between cloud providers, re-architecting applications to be fully cloud-native, or re-platforming for greater efficiency. Whether it’s a simple lift-and-shift, a complex refactor, or a cloud-to-cloud transition, the pressure to migrate smarter and faster is immense.
This acceleration, while enticing, introduces a critical security concern: the risk of moving too fast and overlooking fundamental security principles.
The double-edged sword of GenAI-accelerated migrations
The advantages
Generative AI in cloud migrations offers significant benefits:
- Speed: AI can process vast amounts of data and generate migration strategies far quicker than human teams.
Efficiency: Automation of repetitive tasks, such as code refactoring or infrastructure-as-code (IaC) generation, can free up valuable resources.
Reduced manual error: AI can minimize human error in configuration and deployment, which are common sources of vulnerabilities.
The core problem
The fundamental issue is that while the migration moves faster, the traditional security review processes, which are often manual and time-consuming, may struggle to keep pace. This leaves organizations vulnerable in their newly migrated cloud environments.
The risks
But with this speed come inherent dangers:
- Blind spots in AI-generated code/configurations: While AI aims for efficiency, it may not always prioritize security best practices by default. AI-generated code or configurations could introduce subtle vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or overly permissive access policies that are hard to spot manually in a rapid migration.
Data exposure and prompt injection: GenAI models are trained on large datasets and interact with sensitive information. There's a risk of data leaks through generated outputs, or malicious actors using prompt injection to manipulate the model's behavior and extract confidential data or compromise downstream systems.
Lack of contextual security: The AI might not fully understand the unique security context, compliance requirements, or existing risk posture of an organization, potentially leading to a "lift and shift" of vulnerabilities rather than a secure transformation.
"Shadow AI" and unsanctioned use: The ease of use of GenAI tools could lead to "shadow AI" where employees use unsanctioned tools, further increasing data exposure risks if proper governance and security measures aren't in place.
Integration complexity: Integrating AI-driven migration tools with existing security tools and processes can be complex, potentially creating gaps in visibility and control.
How Rapid7 solves this challenge
Rapid7 understands that speed in cloud migrations shouldn't come at the expense of security. Their approach focuses on integrating security throughout the entire migration lifecycle, providing comprehensive visibility, risk context, and automated controls to navigate the rapid pace of GenAI-driven cloud migrations securely.
Here's how Rapid7 helps:
Shift left security with IaC and container scanning
- Proactive vulnerability detection: Rapid7 integrates security checks directly into the development lifecycle. By scanning Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) templates and container images before deployment, they help organizations identify and fix security flaws at the earliest stage possible. This "shift left" approach prevents misconfigurations and vulnerabilities from ever reaching the cloud environment.
Contextual IaC analysis: Rapid7's Exposure Command can analyze IaC templates in a simulated version of your actual environment, uncovering errors and identifying potentially risky configurations before deployment.
Comprehensive cloud security posture management (CSPM)
- Continuous configuration monitoring: Rapid7's Exposure Command Platform ensures secure configuration and detects "drift" from established baselines as workloads are deployed in cloud environments. This is critical for catching misconfigurations introduced by increasingly rapid deployment lifecycles.
Cloud permissions and least privilege: They help manage cloud permissions and enforce least-privilege access models by analyzing identities and access rights at scale, significantly reducing the attack surface.
Unified visibility: Rapid7 provides consolidated visibility and reporting through dashboards that offer stakeholders clear insights into the security status and risk landscape across the entire cloud environment.
Cloud workload protection (CWP) and vulnerability management
- Tailored for cloud assets: As workloads are deployed, Rapid7 offers vulnerability management specifically tailored for cloud assets, including container security, ensuring that even rapidly provisioned resources are continuously monitored for vulnerabilities. It enhances this by assessing cloud configurations against security benchmarks and using dynamic attack path analysis to prioritize the most critical exposures and misconfigurations across your entire multi-cloud environment.
Sensitive data discovery and protection: Rapid7's Exposure Command enhances visibility into sensitive data across multi-cloud environments by integrating with CSP security services like AWS Macie. This helps classify and secure sensitive data, eliminating manual processes and improving data hygiene.
AI-Driven Risk Prioritization and Automation (SOAR):
- Intelligent risk scoring: Rapid7 leverages AI-generated vulnerability scoring, analyzing vulnerability data to create intelligence-driven scores that prioritize threats based on their potential impact and exploitability. This helps security teams focus on the most critical risks that might arise from rapid changes. It also acts as a trusted single source of security truth that the entire business – from IT and development teams, to senior executives – can confidently rely on to make decisions.
Automated workflows and response: Their Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) solution reduces manual effort. It automates repetitive processes like configuration validation, vulnerability enrichment, and initiating remediation workflows, enabling faster response to threats to threats in the dynamic cloud environment.
Contextual remediation guidance: Rapid7's platform provides actionable guidance for remediating risk by embedding exposure severity, asset context, and exploitability insights with every recommended action. This also enhances the effectiveness of cybersecurity measures and allows for more proactive risk mitigation.
Threat detection and response (XDR/SIEM for Cloud):
- Unified threat visibility: Rapid7's Incident Command, provides advanced detection and response capabilities with threat intelligence and automated workflows to accelerate response times. They integrate with hundreds of tools, including native AWS monitoring and observability services like CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and GuardDuty, to break down security information silos in highly-complex cloud environments.
Continuous monitoring: Rapid7 ensures that even as the AWS environment evolves rapidly with GenAI-driven changes, there's continuous monitoring for threats and suspicious activity.
Moving forward with confidence
Rapid7 acts as an accelerator for organizations seeking to embrace GenAI-driven AWS migrations. With solutions that identify exposures and automate response, Rapid7 empowers cloud-focused organizations to embed security earlier in the software development lifecycle, manage risk continuously, and respond proactively and effortlessly in a highly dynamic cloud landscape.
Discover Rapid7's solutions for securing Gen AI migrations, available now on the AWS Marketplace.
- Artificial Intelligence
- AWS
- Cloud Security