Full Report
Did you know that 40% of all Wiz customers are now in the Zero Critical Club? Here’s how three companies joined their ranks by eliminating critical issues in their cloud environments.
Analysis Summary
# Best Practices: Achieving Zero Critical Cloud Security Status
## Overview
These practices detail the strategies employed by successful organizations (Schrödinger, Schibsted, and a Fortune 500 Financial Company) to eliminate critical cloud misconfigurations, compliance violations, and vulnerabilities across their production environments, transitioning from reactive to proactive security postures. The core elements revolve around enhancing multi-cloud visibility, driving developer self-service remediation, automating workflows, and fostering strong cross-team collaboration.
## Key Recommendations
### Immediate Actions
1. **Achieve Full, Consolidated Visibility:** Deploy and connect a centralized cloud security platform (CSPM/CNAPP) across the entire multi-cloud environment to immediately surface existing exposures.
2. **Prioritize Criticals Using Context:** Use security tools that provide rich context (e.g., sensitive data exposure, active threats) to swiftly prioritize and address existing critical findings, aiming for rapid reduction.
3. **Enable Developer Self-Service Early Detection:** Integrate security tooling (via CLI or IDE plugins) into the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) so engineers can detect and remediate issues like secrets or misconfigurations *before* deployment.
### Short-term Improvements (1-3 months)
1. **Contextualized Remediation and Triage:** Leverage contextual information provided by security platforms to clearly explain the "why" behind critical issues to engineering teams, facilitating faster agreement on remediation steps.
2. **Integrate Ticketing Systems:** Connect the security platform directly with issue tracking systems (e.g., JIRA) to automatically distribute critical findings to the relevant workload owners and accurately track remediation progress.
3. **Establish Remediation Metrics:** Implement and monitor a Mean Time to Remediation (MTTR) metric specifically for critical and high-severity findings across all scanning tools to drive accountability.
4. **Conduct Targeted Education:** Use contextual security findings to provide developers with hands-on examples for secure coding practices, including threat modeling exercises based on real organizational risks.
### Long-term Strategy (3+ months)
1. **Shift to Proactive Security Ecosystem:** Move from ad-hoc scanning to a continuous, proactive security model driven by centralized monitoring and automated policy enforcement.
2. **Democratize Security Management:** Structure security operations to empower development teams to own and autonomously handle security for their respective products, supported by centralized guardrails.
3. **Automate Workflows:** Build custom API queries and automation routines to manage standard settings, configurations, and pipeline deployments based on security posture, reducing manual overhead.
4. **Sustain Organizational Buy-in:** Maintain ongoing organizational awareness campaigns, including general security training and specific education for project owners regarding their security accountability.
## Implementation Guidance
### For Small Organizations
- **Focus on Single Pane of Glass:** Prioritize implementing a tool that provides immediate, comprehensive visibility across all deployed assets (even if they are currently single-cloud) to quickly surface "low-hanging fruit" critical issues.
- **Hands-on Developer Education:** Security teams should meet directly with developers to walk through 1-5 critical findings using the platform's context, establishing trust and a shared vocabulary for risk.
### For Medium Organizations
- **Adopt Security-as-a-Service Model:** Establish a small central security team that governs the platform but delegates remediation tasks directly to the engineering teams responsible for the workloads across various brands or projects.
- **Central Reporting and Alerts:** Centralize vulnerability data into a single dashboard and utilize automated email reminders to prompt accountable teams to address assigned critical findings, ensuring timely response.
### For Large Enterprises
- **Role-Based Access and Permissions:** Implement granular permissions within the security platform, tailoring access based on each brand’s or business unit’s data sensitivity and operational needs.
- **Cross-Team Feedback Loops:** Systematically use data from threat modeling and contextual analysis to inform major policy decisions and guide the entire organization's security posture, ensuring security strategy is data-driven and trusted by engineering leadership.
## Configuration Examples
*Note: Specific vendor configurations are not provided, but the architecture implies key integrations:*
1. **Wiz CLI Integration:** Configure the security scanning CLI tool to run automatically during developer workflows (e.g., local builds or pre-commit hooks) to detect sensitive data and misconfigurations early.
2. **JIRA Integration:** Configure bi-directional synchronization between the Cloud Security Platform and JIRA to:
* Automatically create tickets upon detection of critical findings.
* Assign the ticket based on workload ownership metadata.
* Update the security platform status upon JIRA ticket resolution.
3. **Automated MTTR Dashboards:** Configure a centralized dashboard to ingest data from all security scanners (including the CNAPP) and calculate MTTR against defined Service Level Objectives (SLOs) specifically for critical and high severity findings.
## Compliance Alignment
The practices described inherently align with maturity models found in:
- **NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF):** Emphasis on **Identify** (visibility), **Protect** (secure configuration/coding), and **Detect/Respond** (MTTR metrics and automated alerts).
- **ISO/IEC 27001:** Supporting Annex A controls related to **A.12 Operations security** (logging, monitoring, and security testing).
- **CIS Benchmarks:** By focusing on eliminating cloud *misconfigurations*, they directly address compliance with cloud-specific CIS benchmarks.
## Common Pitfalls to Avoid
1. **Hiding Context from Developers:** Providing raw vulnerability lists without context leads to confusion, low prioritization, and perception of false positives. *Action: Always explain the impact and direct path to remediation.*
2. **Reactive Scanning Only:** Relying solely on periodic or ad-hoc scans means critical issues linger in production. *Action: Integrate scanning into the continuous integration/delivery pipeline.*
3. **Using Security as a Roadblock:** If the security tooling is cumbersome or difficult to use, engineers will bypass it. *Action: Prioritize usability ("user-friendliness") in tool selection and ensure self-service is simpler than requesting security team intervention.*
4. **Siloed Remediation Efforts:** Allowing critical remediation tracking to occur outside the central visibility platform leads to inconsistent reporting and missed deadlines. *Action: Mandate that all remediation tracking happens within the system linked to your MTTR metrics.*
## Resources
- Wiz Blog: [Zero Critical Club Documentation](https://www.wiz.io/blog/welcome-to-the-zero-critical-club) (Reference for model success)
- Wiz Buyers Guide: [Vulnerability Management Buyers Guide](https://www.wiz.io/lp/vulnerability-management-buyers-guide?utm_source=goldcast&utm_medium=webinar&utm_campaign=FY25Q2_T1_Wiz-Cloud) (For deeper dive into lifecycle security)