About a decade ago, organizations were hesitant to adopt cloud solutions, with many citing security concerns. Fast forward to 2019, and 81% of organizations have a multi-cloud strategy, spurred on by the desire for increased flexibility, usage-based spending and desire to respond to market opportunity with greater agility.
As someone who has worked for their entire career in the Managed Network Services space, if I had to pick out, over the past five years, two of the most impactful shifts in managing technology, it would be a shift from traditional, in-house servers to solutions where 3rd parties build “clouds” to provide similar business functions as well as the increased pressure on organizations to have comprehensive cyber-security strategies as threats become more significant.
Amazon Web Services recently announced new capabilities in the AWS Systems Manager Session Manager. Users are now capable of tunneling SSH (Secure Shell) and SCP (Secure Copy) connections directly from a local client without the need for the AWS management console. For years, users have relied on firewalls and bastion hosts in order to securely access cloud assets, but these options have security and management overhead tradeoffs.
A multi-cloud network is a cloud network that consists of more than one cloud services provider. A straightforward type of multi-cloud network involves multiple infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendors. For example, you could have some of your cloud network’s servers and physical network provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), but you’ve integrated that with your servers and physical networking that’s provided by Microsoft Azure.
Enterprises are increasingly adopting a cloud-first approach and migrating their workloads, data and applications to the Cloud. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the Public Cloud industry with more than 30% of the market. As digital transformation progresses and the digital space expands, so does the attack surface that exposes the ongoing proliferation of security risks. In today’s cloud-first world, security remains the primary concern.
The cloud certainly offers its advantages, yet as with any large-scale deployment, the cloud can offer some unforeseen challenges. The concept of the cloud just being “someone else’s data center” has always been a cringe moment for me because this assumes release of security responsibility since ‘someone else will take care of it’.
On AWS, your workloads will be as secure as you make them. The Shared Responsibility Model in which AWS operates ensures the security of the cloud, but what’s in the cloud needs to be secured by the user. This means that as a DevSecOps professional, you need to be proactive about securing your workloads in the Amazon cloud. Achieving the optimal level of security in a multi-cloud environment requires centralized, automated solutions.
Today, we are announcing the general availability of our new module within our Global Intelligence Service with a benchmarking capability on AWS security by baselining the Amazon GuardDuty findings. If you are one of the 100,000 users of Sumo, go to your App catalog and install the Amazon GuardDuty benchmark app with one click and see your threats against the global threats that we gather from hundreds of Sumo customers.
With more business applications moving to the cloud, the ability to assess network behavior has changed from a primarily systems administration function to a daily security operations concern. And whilst sec-ops teams are already familiar with firewall and network device log tools, these can be of limited used in a “cloud first” business where much of the good traffic that occurs is hard to distinguish from potentially risky traffic.
