This post was originally published here by gregg rodriguez.
Public cloud infrastructure is a significant and powerful part of an enterprise’s competitive arsenal but to protect such fast-moving environments requires such as Iaas require cloud security automation.
In our cloud-driven economy, software has become the battleground of innovation, and public cloud infrastructure, or IaaS, — along with its cousins, DevOps and Continuous Delivery — offers the strategic advantage of speed.
It also brings new challenges in maintaining security and compliance requiring the application of the Shared Responsibility Model.
Within this model based on shared responsibility, customer security responsibilities revolve around ensuring cloud infrastructure is architected, deployed and operated in a safe manner. The security team must ensure that the flexibility and power of cloud infrastructure is not used improperly – either accidentally or intentionally.
Enterprises need the critical ability to quickly detect and remediate security issues, then prevent them from recurring – all at cloud scale and cloud speed. That’s not easy to do in an environment that’s constantly changing and rapidly growing exponentially.
The good news is that when it comes to working in public cloud infrastructure – many have come before you. There are already ways to automate cloud security processes and integrate them into automation workflows, making DevOps a force multiplier.
Fast-moving IaaS requires powerful, comprehensive security
By now most security professionals are actively working to address current or future cloud infrastructure adoption. According to Forrester, nearly 60% of North American businesses now rely on cloud on public cloud platforms–five times the percentage of five years ago.
Businesses must innovate quickly to compete in today’s markets and that’s contributing to the continued adoption of public cloud infrastructure. Staying agile, innovative and competitive is no longer an “if, it’s a “must.”
Almost every company is now a software company by default, because they all have a relevant software component driving their products or overall business.
Ford essentially sells computers-on-wheels. FedEx boasts a developer skunkworks to further their technological edge. The era in which traditional industries and technology industries operated in different arenas is over. Every industry is now software driven. Those who fail to adapt to this major shift will soon find themselves obsolete.
Software is typically the fastest and easiest mechanism for delivering faster innovation, because it inherently moves faster than physical product innovation. The app that monitors and tracks your digitally-enabled shoes can be now be iterated much faster than the shoes themselves.
Faster and modern application cloud infrastructure is changing the way we do business
As more businesses are being run on software and delivered as online services — from movies to agriculture to national defense — more of them need public cloud infrastructure. For many others, software is their business and they need IaaS to run it.
To build a faster and modern application infrastructure, enterprises are leveraging public cloud infrastructure to improve operational agility, as well as optimize costs and resources.
Coupling automated public cloud infrastructure with its cousins — DevOps and Continuous Deployment — allows for software innovation at a wildly faster rate. With this software-defined infrastructure in place developers can now provision all the critical operational support features — in a fraction of the time currently required as changes are instantaneous and can be sweeping.
Bottom line, cloud infrastructure is a powerful new tool in the race to stay competitive, and it’s here to stay.
This new application environment is changing the way we do business for the better by enabling DevOps teams to develop and operate as a continuous process, often meaning realtime changes in production and faster delivery. That’s the good news.
The downside is that within these new environments it’s easy for mistakes to find their way in and stay there. Often undetected. Many of them commonly caused by misconfiguration of cloud services can easily expose cloud infrastructure to security threats. To identify and remediate those configurations mistakes that may be exposing your public cloud infrastructure requires a solution utilizing cloud security automation to uncover and reduce potential risk.
Halo delivers cloud security automation
Read our product brief to learn more about Halo can help you maintain continuous security and compliance by automating best practices across your multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments on major cloud provider platforms.
Photo:www.criticalcase.com
