Implementing a Successful Cloud Tagging Strategy: Everything You Need to Know

Originally published by Tenable.

Written by Tom Croll, Advisor at Lionfish Tech Advisors.

To manage your cloud resources effectively and securely, consistent tagging of assets across all cloud platforms is essential. In this blog, we’ll explain tagging’s main benefits, as well as strategies and best practices for success.

Before you can secure your public cloud environment, you must first identify all your resources and where they are running. This can be a challenge for security teams and business leaders, especially in large organizations where application teams use multiple services and providers. When you tag assets appropriately, you can identify ownership, implement effective controls and provide visibility into the organization’s security posture. This allows technical staff and business leaders to make informed decisions, improve efficiency and effectively manage risk.

Understanding the tagging challenge

As we increasingly rely on public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, OCI and Google Cloud to host a wide variety of resources, we reap many benefits, such as scalability and elasticity of infrastructure. However, we also must tackle new and unique challenges, including the implementation of consistent asset tagging across numerous resources and platforms.

Tagging is a critical component for effective cloud resource management because it allows organizations to categorize infrastructure based on various parameters such as ownership, purpose, production status or cost center. However, it can be difficult to maintain a consistent tagging strategy due to a number of key challenges, such as, our vast number of cloud resources, human error, lack of effective enforcement and evolving organizational needs.

Inconsistent tagging can lead to difficulties identifying resource ownership; increased costs due to unidentified and therefore unused resources; and potential security risks from stale, unpatched workloads or misconfigured infrastructure.

Poor tagging has contributed to multiple high-profile data breaches that result from misconfigured resources, such as AWS S3 storage buckets, that could have been discovered and remediated with proper cloud security controls in place. To mitigate these risks, you must first ensure deep visibility and contextual awareness of cloud infrastructure. Strong and consistent tagging policies can help us achieve this goal.

The core challenges

Diversity of resources

Public cloud providers offer many services, each with its own unique features and tagging requirements. For instance, an Amazon EC2 instance might have different tagging capabilities compared to an Azure Blob storage instance or a Google Cloud Function. This diversity makes it difficult to implement a universal tagging strategy that works seamlessly across all resource types.

Human error

Manual tagging can result in inconsistencies and mistakes. This could be due to simple oversights, misunderstanding of tagging conventions or even typos. These inconsistencies can lead to mislabeled or unlabeled resources, making it hard to manage and track these resources effectively.

Enforcement challenges

Without strict enforcement mechanisms, teams can easily neglect tagging or use it inconsistently, especially in large organizations where multiple teams or departments use the same cloud account. Each team might have its own tagging conventions, creating a lack of standardization across the organization, leading to confusion and inefficiency.

Evolving organizational needs

As organizations grow and evolve, their tagging requirements can change. What worked for a small startup might not work for a large enterprise. Maintaining consistent tagging standards over time can be difficult, especially when dealing with legacy resources tagged according to outdated conventions.

Implications of inconsistent tagging

Inflated costs

Consistent tagging lets you track resource usage and associated costs, ensuring you’re not paying for unidentified resources that go unnoticed and no longer needed.

Security risks

Unidentified resources can pose a significant security risk. If you don't know what a resource is for or who owns it, you can't be sure it's configured correctly or if it has vulnerabilities.

Difficulty identifying resource ownership

Without clearly defined ownership of cloud resources, it can be challenging to determine who should be notified in case of an incident or who should approve changes to a resource.

If security cannot identify and quantify the risk of removing non-compliant resources, insecure configurations go unnoticed and unattended, and leave organizations exposed to the risk of data breaches, reputational damage and compliance failure.

Inconsistent tagging can have far-reaching implications for your organization. However, these challenges can be addressed through strategic use of policy-as-code and automation.

Policy-as-code: The core of a preventive cloud security program

Policy-as-code translates human language-based policies into code that can be run by a computer. A policy framework is based upon a specific programming language like YAML or Rego, is readable in plain English, and makes it easier for non-developers to create and edit the code that implements policies.

Benefits of policy-as-code

Policy-as-code ensures consistency and reduces human error. It also allows for scalability, repeatability, and transparency. With policy-as-code, you can easily scale your tagging strategy as your organization grows; repeat the same standards across different projects or teams; and provide transparency into your tagging policies. Compared to manually managing rules and procedures, policy-as-code benefits include:

• Efficiency: When policies are defined as code, they can be shared and enforced automatically at scale. This is much more efficient than requiring engineers to apply policies manually when resources are created or standards are changed. It’s also more efficient to update and share policies when the policies are defined in clear, concise code rather than when they’re described in plain English that may be interpreted differently by each team.
• Speed: Automating policy enforcement cuts overhead costs for security teams by reducing the need for manual audits and enabling enforcement efforts to scale.
• Collaboration: Writing policy in a standardized format allows stakeholders to work from the same source code. That way, they can review the policies together to remove ambiguity and ensure consistency. Developers and business teams can use the same language to describe policy, which simplifies collaboration by making the policy easier to understand.
• Visibility: Using standardized policies facilitates visibility into the security posture of your cloud resources. That way, multiple teams can quickly see which controls are in place simply by checking for policy names and versions. Security teams do not need to understand multiple controls defined in different languages or policies that are not written in a consistent way.
• Version control: If you keep track of different versions of your policy files as they change, policy-as-code ensures that you can revert to an earlier configuration easily in the event that a new policy version introduces issues in live systems.
• Automated testing: When policies are written in code, it’s easy to validate them before rollout by using automated tools, which lowers the risk of introducing critical errors into production environments.

Enforcing continuous compliance using automated tooling

Understanding continuous compliance

Continuous compliance involves regularly checking your cloud resources to ensure they align with your tagging policies. This is achieved by running automated checks that flag or correct non-compliant resources.

Benefits of continuous compliance

Continuous compliance offers several benefits. It ensures that your resources are always in line with your tagging policies; helps identify and rectify non-compliance issues promptly; and provides ongoing visibility into your compliance status. This leads to improved resource management, cost control and security.

In summary, automated compliance allows us to:

1. Maintain alignment between resources and policies
2. Identify and rectify non-compliance quickly
3. Maintain visibility of compliance status

Tagging strategies for cloud security success

Avoid complex policies

It’s expensive and time-consuming to design unique tagging policies from scratch. Plenty of tagging standards and templates exist already. Cloud application teams should use these tried and tested methods to ensure that they can quickly and easily implement and maintain compliance with their policies.

Use predefined tagging policies that are consistent across all cloud resources

Cloud security vendors should offer multiple predefined tagging policies that are standardized across multiple cloud resources and providers. As your organization grows or your requirements evolve, you can easily customize these policies or use a new standard that meets your organization’s needs.

Use runtime tooling to identify orphaned resources

Identify untagged resources using automated cloud security tooling. Advanced tooling can automatically discover untagged resources in your cloud environment and suggest appropriate tags based on metadata and permissions. Some tooling can even create pull requests, highlighting missing tags and suggesting code snippets that can be used for remediation. This allows you to create actionable tickets and quickly integrate these tasks into your development pipeline.

Use policy-as-code to automate tagging enforcement

The most common use of policy-as-code is to automate the enforcement of tagging standards. Predefined templates and sandbox environments are available for developing and testing your policies. Use these pre-existing templates to help automate your tagging standards and start you on your policy-as-code journey.

Action plan

1. Start planning for tagging using existing standards and policy templates.
2. Map out CI/CD pipeline, tools and integrations needed for policy-as-code security.
3. Enforce your tagging policy on all new resources by using policy-as-code to scan infrastructure code for mistakes before assets are created.
4. Identify and remediate untagged resources using automated tooling to locate all assets lacking appropriate ownership and configuration information.
5. Conduct regular reviews of your tagging policy to ensure continued alignment with requirements and be open to updating your standards as your cloud infrastructure evolves.

To learn more about cloud-tagging best practices and policies, watch our on-demand CSA CloudBytes webinar “Tagging Strategies for Cloud Security Success.”

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About the Author

Tom Croll is an Advisor at Lionfish Tech Advisors and a Tenable consultant. As a former Gartner analyst, he co-authored the original research on CNAPP, defining the requirements for effective application security in public cloud. With over 20 years of industry experience, he was also a pioneer of DevSecOps methodologies. He currently provides advisory services in cloud application and infrastructure security (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS), security service edge (SSE), secure access service edge (SASE) and security posture management (SSPM).