Lateral traffic movement in Virtual Private Clouds

Cloud vendors have introduced virtual private cloud (VPC) structures to bring the benefits of private cloud into the public cloud. These structures provide vertical segmentation and isolation for application projects implemented within them. However, the security context needs to be considered as applications communicate with one another between VPCs using technologies such as peering and privatelinks. Applications are usually highly dependent on each other for data and functionality, leading to cross-connections between VPC structures. The implications between different connection setups need to be vetted to ensure that access is not overly permissive, thus leading to possible lateral movement of traffic.