This post was originally published here by gregg rodriguez.
Public cloud, or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), offers an enhanced level of flexibility and scalability with its on-demand unlimited virtual space and abundant server resources. Though as more enterprises rush to reap the benefits of the cloud, they’re facing new challenges in maintaining cloud security and compliance.
In spite of the hurdles, public cloud remains a top priority for 31% of enterprises surveyed by RightScale. In addition, many companies are taking a more balanced approach, with 28% prioritizing hybrid cloud and an another 17% prioritizing public and private cloud equally.
Benefits of cloud computing
In today’s digital economy, you’re likely constantly looking for ways to be more agile, to differentiate your offerings and outpace the competition. Cloud computing, delivered through services like AWS and Azure, can be extremely beneficial for your company because they allow you to create the modern, agile application environment your developers and IT departments need to innovate faster and more continuously. All of which is critical to staying competitive.
With the power of IaaS, your organization can get instant access to products and services at the forefront of digital innovation, such as serverless computing.
How does IaaS enable this?
These easily accessible, revolutionary services from AWS and Azure, enable you to set up cloud computing infrastructure in minutes, without having to incur any major capital expenses. This means your IT team can develop new products, rethink business models, and reach customers in new ways in a fraction of the time currently required.
While this new approach to setting up a modern application environment using the power of IaaS brings numerous opportunities for optimization, it also presents new challenges from a security and compliance perspective.
So why is security challenging in AWS and Azure, or any cloud computing environment?
Cloud calls for new approach to security and compliance
Cloud computing is based on a new infrastructure model which requires a new approach to security with additional capabilities that most legacy systems cannot deliver.
What makes security more complex is that the scale and speed of IaaS environments are bigger and much faster compared to traditional IT environments, and as a virtual hosting solution public cloud computing is somewhat more abstract. Instead of being accessible through physical hardware, all servers, software and networks are hosted in the cloud, off premise. It’s a real-time virtual environment hosted between several different servers simultaneously.
Legacy security systems don’t scale to secure every endpoint and the expanding cloud attack surface to the degree required for security and compliance. Only 16% of organizations surveyed reported that the capabilities of traditional security tools are sufficient to manage security across the cloud, a 6 percentage point drop from the previous survey, with 84% saying traditional security solutions either don’t work at all in cloud environments or have very limited functionality.
There are simply more things in more places that need to be monitored and protected. Additionally, the rate of change, both for code and infrastructure, is orders of magnitude higher.
Despite its abstract “nature” the benefits of cloud computing still far outweigh the challenges. Paying for only what you use eliminates the need to pay for unutilized IT resources, which is a lot more cost effective and extremely appealing from a deployment perspective, as you can whip up a new and improved environment in a matter of minutes.
How do you keep up with a growing inventory of 10s of 1000s of assets and potential issues to resolve?
The answer: Automation.
How CloudPassage Halo can help maintain security and compliance
In order for a security practitioner, to enable all the benefits of the cloud, you have to figure out how to maintain awareness of your assets, the issues that threaten those assets, and be able to resolve those at quickly. That’s only possible with automation.
CloudPassage makes this process very fast, and very easy by utilizing automation within Halo Cloud Secure to deliver comprehensive visibility, protection, and continuous compliance monitoring to reduce cyber risk.
In Datamation’s 2019 side-by-side, product comparison of the Top 8 Cloud Security Solution Providers, Halo was the only cloud security solution noted for its regulatory security and compliance policy use cases.
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