Multi-cloud infrastructure is becoming a standard across industries. According to one recent study, some 78% of today’s enterprises use three or more cloud providers.
Naturally, the question of security becomes a big priority. With its many operational benefits, multi-cloud environments are also more complex, making it harder to maintain secure configurations across providers. With deployment sprawl, there’s also a lack of centralized visibility and monitoring, which may leave security gaps.
Thankfully, Terraform, the infrastructure management tool, has an answer for these challenges. In this article, we’ll explore how its modular design is ideal for deploying secure configurations across providers.
Understanding Terraform Modules
Terraform modules are reusable code templates that package infrastructure configurations, allowing teams to deploy standardized configurations repeatedly without manual coding. They can be compared to libraries and packages in programming languages and provide many of the same benefits.
Just like a programmer would almost always use libraries to avoid writing code from scratch, real-world Terraform configurations heavily depend on modules to simplify infrastructure management and enforce consistency. They simplify infrastructure management by reducing the need to configure each component individually.
Modules can be configured manually or sourced from the Terraform Registry, an open-source hub for sharing and finding modules.
How Terraform Modules Ensure Security in Multi-Cloud Environments
While not intended necessarily as a security feature, the concept of modules provides many security benefits, especially in complex, multi-cloud environments. Managing all of that infrastructure manually is a sure way to introduce vulnerabilities.
Let’s break down how modules address this problem and enable robust and consistent security practices in multi-cloud environments.
The main security benefit comes from the ability to set reusable configurations that can be enforced across your different environments. This level of consistency is essential for addressing one of the biggest challenges for multi-cloud security, configuration drift, while misconfigurations and other human-related risks are also brought down to a minimum.
Another benefit is the increased visibility and control that modules offer over infrastructure changes. Every configuration is stored as code, creating an auditable record of security settings and changes. If problems arise, the root cause can be quickly identified and reverted.
The Terraform Registry provides a selection of tried and tested modules for various security functions like access control, firewalls, and security groups.
Developers can also easily track version changes and updates to these modules, ensuring that infrastructure remains secure and compliant.
There are modules dedicated to each cloud provider, so you can ensure that all your security settings will work across your infrastructure, regardless of who hosts it.
The modules you will find in the Terraform Registry come with pre-set configurations for various security controls. They are tailored to ensure best practices while also aligning with compliance requirements your organization may be subjected to.
Implementing Security Best Practices with Terraform Modules
Let’s go over some of the most essential security controls you should implement with Terraform Modules, along with some tips on how to do so.
Access controls are necessary to limit who, why, and when identities can access your resources. In Terraform, you can install provider-specific identity and access management (IAM) modules to manage permissions consistently.
For example, there is the AWS IAM module that allows you to define roles, policies, and MFA requirements. It is designed and verified to match the IAM Best Practices published by AWS. Similar modules are available for Google Cloud, Azure, and other providers.
Network security controls, such as firewalls and security groups, can also be provisioned with Terraform modules.
Firewalls control access at the network level, filtering incoming and outgoing traffic based on predefined rules. The creation of these rules can be automated with existing modules, and applied consistently across the infrastructure.
Data protection controls play a key role in securing sensitive information, which is a common target for cyberattacks. Terraform modules can help you implement critical data protection measures, such as encryption for data-at-rest and in-transit, as well as automated backups.
Multi-cloud environments are particularly sensitive to data-in-transit vulnerabilities, as data frequently moves between different cloud providers. With modules, you can enforce the use of encrypted transport protocols, such as HTTPS and TLS, ensuring secure data transmissions across your network.
Automated data backups can also be easily configured and applied throughout the infrastructure. They provide a reliable way to restore information, which can be useful in crisis situations, such as an outage, accidental deletion, or a ransomware attack.
Conclusion
Consistency in configuration is the main ingredient of a secure multi-cloud environment. Terraform modules provide precisely this benefit, making them the ideal solution for companies looking to manage their infrastructure in a safe and scalable way.
This modular design is highly flexible, allowing for configurations to evolve with new security policies and be applied consistently regardless of the complexity of the environment.
To see the benefits firsthand, explore the extensive Terraform module ecosystem and experiment with building your own reusable configurations.
