Breaking Through the Fog of Cloud Security
Those of us in technology are all too familiar with Moore’s Law, which holds that computer processing power will double every two years. Unfortunately, as we are witnessing with the recent slew of data breaches and the Shellshock and Heartbleed vulnerabilities, Moore’s Law seems to hold true when it comes to malware and attack methods as well, The threat landscape is more sophisticated and complex than ever before. Hackers, who once had to build their own malware from scratch, now have access to numerous toolkits that make developing their own variant of malware easy. For the hacker who would rather spend money than time developing malware, there are malware exchanges where anyone can buy malware built for anything from controlling a webcam to siphoning credit card information, and every malicious activity in between. Combine this new accessibility of malware with the ease of organizing groups of people around the world via social media and you have a dangerous new frontier.
This and high-level breaches like the ones we saw with Target and Home Depot have sent companies scrambling to ensure that their technology infrastructure is secure and particularly their cloud environments. In truth, research shows that cloud environments are as secure as on-premises deployments but many erroneously believe that the same traditional security tools that protect applications on premises protect their cloud applications, and/or that the cloud security platforms that applications are built on protect those applications as they do the platform. In fact they don’t. A new breed of security tools built specifically for the cloud is what is needed.
Hackers are taking advantage of vulnerabilities and finding new ways to access data at all hours of the day and night, so security solutions need to be continuously monitored around the clock, and that’s difficult for most organizations to provide internally primarily due to budget and resources. Below are four of many critical detection and protection capabilities that should be part of every organization’s security solutions:
- Intrusion detection to identify and mitigate threats as they move across an organization’s network
- Vulnerability scanning to inspect servers for known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that expose them to potential takeover by cyber attackers
- Web application threat detection to observe traffic destined for web applications and identifying malformed requests that are indicative of a web application attack
- Log analysis to identify indicators of compromise by analyzing seemingly unrelated log events from operating systems, applications, databases and other security products
Making sure your bases are covered to ensure complete security within the cloud is obviously what everyone strives for but often this goal is put on the backburner due to lack of resources and budget constraints. Now, Alert Logic has introduced a tightly integrated, fully managed cloud-based security and compliance suite that is a combination of market-leading technologies and human expertise in the form of 24×7 monitoring by security and compliance specialists. Delivering the functionality, security content and actionable intelligence that organizations need to uncover and remediate active threats, Alert Logic Cloud Defender protects organizations from cyber threats targeted at business critical infrastructure, wherever it’s deployed – on-premises, in a public cloud or in a hybrid datacenter.
Don’t let your organization make the next hacked headline. Take the proper security precautions to ensure sensitive data in the cloud is secure.
Disclaimer: This article was written by a guest contributor in his/her personal capacity. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of CloudWedge.com
