Not long ago, amid the Microsoft Exchange Server attacks, Lookout Chief Strategy Officer Aaron Cockerill wrote about why cloud apps are more secure than their on-premise counterparts. That’s a really important lesson and an initial step towards securing your organization. Here’s part two of that narrative: you also need dedicated security to ensure that your cloud infrastructure and apps are secure.
This year we launched Teleport Cloud, a new service for providing a hosted version of Teleport Access Plane. One of the first problems the team had to tackle was how to secure the new infrastructure properly, and the team wanted to ensure the best possible results by engaging in an independent audit. As with the Teleport core product, we engaged with Doyensec to provide an independent security audit of our production environment.
There are several advantages to consuming software as a service (SaaS). For starters, it allows companies of any size to leverage enterprise-grade software (CRM, service desk, security, etc.) in a pay-as-you-go model to avoid spending large sums of money on shelfware that may never get put to use. SaaS also offers customers the ability to scale or change the usage of their software with little to no advance notice, and makes them more agile in delivering products to market.
For years now, modern organizations have enjoyed a seamless procurement experience when purchasing software products through AWS Marketplace. AWS has made it possible for customers to purchase third-party software using their allocated AWS budget while still being able to negotiate custom pricing and legal terms directly with their favorite vendors.
DarkSide is a ransomware-as-a-service platform that made headlines on May 8, 2021, for targeting Colonial Pipeline, resulting in a shutdown of their pipeline operations. The DarkSide ransomware platform first appeared in August 2020, advertising that they would not target organizations in the education, government, medical, or non-profit sectors.
For cloud-native organizations — those begun in the past decade or so — obtaining critical services from other cloud-native companies makes sense. After all, the whole point of being cloud native is to avoid physical infrastructure wherever possible. You want to focus on your business, not managing the systems and infrastructures that support it. That strategy applies to your logging and security information and event management (SIEM) solution, as well.
Best practices for securing an AWS environment have been well-documented and generally accepted, such as AWS’s guidance. However, organizations may still find it challenging on how to begin applying this guidance to their specific environments. In this blog series, we’ll analyze anonymized data from Netskope customers that include security settings of 650,000 entities from 1,143 AWS accounts across several hundred organizations.
