When Your Cloud Becomes Too Complex to Trust

Every year, AWS adds hundreds of new services and features. The power of the cloud is undeniable, but with it comes staggering complexity. So much so that Gartner predicts that human error will make up 99% of cloud security failures by 2025.

We started Noq because we believe complexity will be security’s biggest adversary. Cloud adoption has been a boon for security teams, but cloud operations will require more confidence and trust to overcome the remaining formidable challenges in our journey to a secure cloud. For us, the obvious place to start is with one of the most complex challenges in cloud today - Identity and Access Management.

Cloud IAM Engineers shoulder the complexity but without the tools

If you aren’t familiar with your Cloud IAM engineer's day job, here’s a summary.

It’s 8 am. You just finished your morning coffee and open your laptop to find the bouncing Slack icon. Nine cloud IAM problems waiting to command your day. Access denied errors, cross-account request issues, new account setup requests, privilege escalation vulnerabilities, and least privilege production deployments are just some of the challenges you might be facing. And with each change, you wonder if you inadvertently opened up a gap for an attacker, or broke something else the company relies on. Will adding this service control policy slow down developers? Will adding a policy to this role provide the developer with the permissions they need, and sufficiently protect customer data? Will this resource policy change finally unblock that developer? There is nothing to prove that the outcome sought is the outcome delivered. 

Introducing Noq: the world's first IAMOps solution that eliminates AWS IAM complexity

We started Noq to simplify permissions management and operationalize one of the most powerful cloud security tools we have as defenders. But like most things in the cloud, great cloud security depends on great engineering. Noq’s mission is to enable great engineering by reducing the complexity of the cloud, starting with IAM and permissions management at scale. We do this via a framework we can call IAMOps.  

IAM Ops gives DevSecOps their sanity

IAMOps is how Dev, Sec and Ops collaborate on administration of IAM privileges to uphold the principle of least privilege with less effort. Noq automates IAMOps by providing an interface that allows cloud IAM engineers to manage their hundreds of AWS accounts in a single place, a self-service portal where developers can get and give access, rules to delegate authority to escalate access and decentralize approvals, advanced analytics to develop and deploy new roles and policies, and automated reasoning to approve low-risk requests and annotate high-risk ones.

Just as DevOps “shifted left” responsibilities for continuous integration testing and deployment, IAMOps empowers developers to make great cloud security part of great cloud engineering.

Over the next series of blog posts, we’ll introduce you to the Noq IAMOps Platform and the clever ways we’ve simplified one of the most complex problems in cloud. We are currently working with design partners, so if collaborating on this effort is interesting, please reach out to us.