This post was originally published here by marc luo.
Cloud and agile computing has introduced a new set of challenges into the enterprise security space. Virtual servers are now built in an automated fashion, based on a set of unique identification parameters that vary depending on the organization. And in order to to provide improved speed and agility – these servers are not tied to an IP address or MAC addresses.
Clearly based on how the cloud works a new approach to security is required – one that incorporates an agile, automated security model based around the principles of visibility and speed. But as you likely know, not all cloud security computing solutions are created equally.
To find a security solution combining the reporting capabilities needed for compliance checks, the speed and automation to monitor and protect high velocity workloads, the agility to integrate your DevOps toolchains & cycles, and the visibility that lets you easily scan ephemeral workloads for vulnerabilities and mis-configurations, (so you know which workloads to prioritize) ask yourself the following six questions:
Does the security product scale?
Your security solution needs to be able to handle new workloads being spun up or torn down at a moments notice. Can your security product handle this fluid operation?
Does your security tool provide comprehensive coverage without friction?
Manual processes simply can’t keep up with the speed and release cycles of DevOps teams. In order to maintain continuous workload security and compliance in the cloud and CI/CD pipeline, you need to automate as much as possible. And in order for everything to run smoothly, your automated security and compliance solutions should integrate seamlessly with your existing DevOps toolset.
Does the security product identify the workloads by IP address?
IP addresses will be reused constantly with workloads being spun up and down at a moments notice in cloud environments. Therefore it’s important for security products to tag servers with a unique ID, rather than rely on an IP address. What happens if five different workloads use the same IP address in the same day?
Does the security product require you to maintain anything for the backend?
Security applications and on-prem security products require full time employees to manually maintain, update, and patch. That kind of maintenance is expensive, not to mention becoming harder as our industry continues to tackle with a growing talent shortage. Halo was purpose-built and automated for the cloud, all of our functionality is available within our SaaS offering, all within a single UI.
Does the security solution work anywhere?
Where your workloads are hosted may change over time. Therefore your security should be portable, something you can carry over with a workload. If your requirements change to multi-cloud then the security product should be able to handle multiple environments at once. This would include private data centers and bare metal servers.
Is the security product API centric?
It’s critical that a security product be API centric and integrate into products your team already uses such as: Chef, Puppet, Jenkins, Jira, Splunk, and Sumo Logic. Without these integrations, how can you truly say that your security product is baked into the CI/CD process?
Not sure what security product can truly meet all of these rigorous demands? Then reach out to our team. We can fill you in on how CloudPassage Halo meets all of these standards, and more.
Photo:CIO UK
