Digital attackers are increasingly turning their attention to the cloud. According to the 2020 Trustwave Global Security Report, the volume of attacks targeting cloud services more than doubled 7% in 2018 to 20% a year later. This growth made cloud services the third most-targeted environment after corporate and e-commerce at 54% and 22%, respectively. These trends highlight the need for organizations to secure their cloud environments.

By this time in 2020, you’re probably well past the panic of pandemic cybersecurity. The “New Normal” isn’t very new anymore and what was once perceived as short term crisis management of security is looking more like a long term solution. As we look ahead, it’s important to look at what we’ve learned from this situation, as security professionals and how we can apply that to the long road we still have ahead of us.

This week Netskope hosted our annual executive briefing with the US Embassy in London, converted, in common with many events this year, into an online webinar. We wanted to take the opportunity to consider what impact this year’s unprecedented changes and uncertainty were having on the cybersecurity landscape.

With Gartner releasing its latest Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure earlier this month, it seemed an appropriate time to explore the intersection of SD-WAN and SASE. Both of these technological approaches hold great promise and are large, billion-dollar markets, sharing the common goal of connecting users to the data and applications critical to doing their job. The two technologies demonstrate the increasing overlap and tightening linkage between networking and security investments.

Today’s security operations require coordinated efforts from multiple team members, many of whom are in different roles and technology specializations. Complexity inhibits the ability to conduct time-sensitive operations such as incident response. Security engineers and the threat hunters have to be on the same page when it comes to establishing priorities and conducting investigation, across the entire detection & response lifecycle.

Teleport 4.4 is here! The major innovation we’re introducing in this version is much improved control over interactive sessions for SSH and Kubernetes protocols. We’ll do a deeper dive into session control later, but for those who aren’t familiar with it, Teleport is an open source project. It provides access to SSH servers and Kubernetes clusters on any infrastructure, on any cloud, or any IoT device, anywhere, even behind NAT.

A SSH session can be interactive or non-interactive. The session starts when a computer or human connects to a node using SSH. SSH sessions can be established using public/private key cryptography or can use short lived SSH Certificates, similar to how Teleport works. Organizations often want to know who is accessing the systems and provide a greater level of control over who and when people are accessing them, which is where Teleport 4.4 comes into play.

By 2025 the amount of data stored in the cloud by both governments, organizations, and individuals will exceed 75 Zettabytes – an estimated 49% of the world’s 175 zettabytes of data at that time. This trend has no doubt been accelerated by COVID, as organizations have been forced to shorten cloud migration timeframes to ensure business continuity during the pandemic.