This post was originally published here by casey pechan.
When it comes to enterprise security, the needs are growing faster than universities can produce graduates with the relevant diplomas. It can be challenging to break down an organization’s list of security controls into something manageable, let alone doable. Accomplishing it with a single security platform – conventional wisdom says impossible.
The main concerns we, (and our industry) have repeatedly heard are: “We need full visibility into our cloud-based workloads. We need to discover vulnerabilities and misconfigurations as fast as they’re spun up. We need a way to analyze and prioritize them so security teams know which of them represents an actual exposure and subsequent risk to the business. Finally we need security to be automated so it integrates easily with our DevOps teams and their toolchains – flagging problems prior to deployment when it’s both cheaper and easier to fix.”
Maybe you’re the person tasked with investigating the world of security solutions claiming to provide automation, true visibility, and insight into your organization’s cloud assets. Or maybe you’re the person who’s been haranguing your colleagues about how necessary speed, automation, visibility and automation is for security and why can’t they find something that actually works?
If so you’re in good company. This year 84% of cybersecurity professionals surveyed for the LinkedIn Cloud Security Report reported that legacy security tools don’t work in the cloud. And 43% of those respondents cited better visibility into user activity and system behavior as a major reason for choosing a cloud-based security solution.
These days the only way to stay secure is to have full visibility of your assets across infrastructures, quickly prioritize the risk level of any given workload – and organize remediation policies according to the most pressing need. The latest Forrester report, cloud workload security solutions, says it best: “Because of the ephemeral nature of cloud workloads and the increased speed for software delivery, manual security configuration no longer works. [Security & Risk] pros must find centralized, automated, and auditable ways to monitor and secure cloud workloads reliably.” In short, the impossible must be made possible.
Enter: Project Cielo
Project Cielo is for all of you who want unified visibility into your public cloud infrastructure, and better yet, insight and organization of said infrastructure. Complete visibility into workloads is a table stake, but often can’t help teams prioritize what to do with the vulnerabilities and risks now they can finally see them. Our newest product delivers comprehensive visibility and continuous monitoring of your cloud workloads, along with a way to identify and implement best practices and security controls. Adding Project Cielo, to the CloudPassage Halo platform you can get visibility, protection, and continuous compliance monitoring for compute, storage, database, and networking cloud services for both AWS and Azure – all from a single solution (that also handles workloads and containers).
Project Cielo will help you answer the following questions:
- Are the various components of my application compliant with best practices, corporate standards, and applicable regulatory controls?
- Is my application environment exposed to vulnerabilities and exploits?
- Are there any threats against my application? Could those threats take advantage of my application to cause a loss?
Examining the above questions, Cielo will organize your workloads so you can understand which security issues represent the most pressing exposures or threats. After all, security issues can assume various forms not limited to: vulnerabilities, configuration issues, access control changes or even high risk behavior.
It’s critical now to be able to automatically prioritize the thousands of weaknesses that are being flagged for security engineers to handle. While there simply isn’t enough time in the day to tackle everything, there is time to find the most important weaknesses with Cielo. So unless you’re able to monitor all your workloads from one simple platform, a platform whose API integrates into ALL of your additional DevOps toolsets, some of your workloads risk slipping through the cracks.
We live in a world inundated with security breaches. Obtaining visibility into all of your organization’s public cloud IaaS environments (including an inventory of what resources are in use, the configurations and associations between those resources, and misconfigurations that create risk) is essential.
We’re also in an industry that’s struggling with a growing shortage of talent and cybersecurity graduates, as breaches and malware multiply. But thanks to automation, organizations can maintain a complete and up-to-date inventory of their cloud assets in use, across multiple environments, throughout the enterprise.
Photo:China Money Network
