Five Security Features That Your Next-Gen Cloud Must Have
With cloud computing, virtualization, and a new type of end-user – the security landscape around the modern infrastructure needed to evolve. IT consumerization and a lot more data within the organization has forced security professionals to adopt better ways to protect their environment. The reality is that standard firewalls and UTMs are just no longer enough. New technologies have emerged which can greatly enhance the security of a cloud and virtualization environment – without impacting performance. This is where the concept of next-generation security came from.
It was the need to abstract physical security services and create logical components for a powerful infrastructure offering.
With that in mind – let’s look at five great next-gen security features that you should consider.
- Virtual security services. What if you need application-level security? What about controlling and protecting inbound, outbound, and intra-VM traffic? New virtual services can give you entire virtual firewalls, optimized anti-virus/anti-malware tools, and even proactive intrusion detection services. Effectively, these services allow for the multi-tenant protection and support of network virtualization and cloud environments.
- Going agentless. Clientless security now directly integrates with the underlying hypervisor. This gives your virtual platform the capability to do fast, incremental scans as well as the power to orchestrate scans and set thresholds across VM’s. Here’s the reality – you can do all of this without performance degradation. Now, we’re looking at direct virtual infrastructure optimization while still maintaining optimal cloud resource efficiency. For example, if you’re running on a VMware ecosystem, there are some powerful “agentless” technologies you can leverage. Trend Micro’s Deep Security agentless anti-malware scanning, intrusion prevention and file integrity monitoring capabilities help VMware environments benefit from better resources utilization when it comes to securing VMs. Further, Deep Security has been optimized to support the protection of multitenant environments and cloud-based workloads, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
- Integrating network traffic with security components. Not only can you isolate VMs, create multi-tenant protection across your virtual and cloud infrastructure, and allow for application-specific protection – you can now control intra-VM traffic at the networking layer. This type of integration allows the security layer to be “always-on.” That means security continues to be active even during activities likes a live VM migration.
- Centralized cloud and virtual infrastructure management/visibility. Whether you have a distributed cloud or virtualization environment – management and direct visibility are critical to the health of your security platform. One of the best things about next-generation security is the unified visibility the management is capable of creating. Look for the ability to aggregate, analyze and audit your logs and your entire security infrastructure. Powerful spanning policies allow your virtual infrastructure to be much more proactive when it comes to security. By integrating virtual services (mentioned above) into the management layer – administrators are able to be proactive, stay compliant, and continuously monitor the security of their infrastructure.
- Consider next-gen end-point security for your cloud users. There are some truly disruptive technologies out there today. Here’s an example: Cylance. This security firm replaces more traditional, signature-based, technologies with a truly disruptive architecture. Basically, Cylance uses a machine-learning algorithm to inspect millions of file attributes to determine the probability that a particular file is malicious. The algorithmic approach significantly reduces the endpoint and network resource requirement. Because of its signature-less approach, it is capable of detecting both new threats and new variants of known threats that typically are missed by signature-based techniques. Here’s the other really cool part – even when your users disconnect from the cloud, they’re still very well protected. Because the Cylance endpoint agent does not require a database of signatures or daily updates, and is extremely lightweight on network, compute, and data center resources – it can remain effective even when disconnected for long periods.
Your environment is going to become more distributed. Virtual environments allow for greater scale where administrators are able to replicate data, better support distributed users, and deliver more complex workloads. Throughout all of this – you will need to ensure that your data points are secure. The dependence on the IT framework will only increase the amount of workloads we place into the modern data center and virtual platform. Because of this – it’s critical to deploy powerful security features while still maintaining optimal performance.
Next-generation security technologies do just that. We are now introducing powerful – scalable – ways to deploy security solutions into the modern cloud and virtualization environment. As you build out your virtual and cloud platforms, make sure to look at security solutions which utilize next generation features.
Ultimately, you’ll create a more efficient platform, improve end-user experiences, and be able to control your security environment on a truly distributed scale.
Source: TheWHIR