What are the challenges of fully deploying cloud security?

Virtualization and cloud computing can bring many advantages to businesses, but they also pose challenges, especially in terms of security. The same flexibility, agility, and on-demand scalability make virtualization and cloud computing attractive to businesses, but both involve complex security deployments.

Security is the service provider Alert Logic co-founder and chief strategist Misha Govshteyn addresses these issues, and what cloud security the vendor must provide, and why the security industry is the last to move into the cloud infrastructure components.

Flexibility and scalability in cloud security deployments

Most of these challenges arise from the ephemeral nature of the cloud computing environment. "The cloud environment is changing very quickly," he said, pointing to Amazon's cloud computing services as an example, "we can often see customers increase their capacity by two to three times times during the day and reduce it at night." ”

This is a very difficult environment for security providers, unless they have some kind of virtualized security infrastructure that automatically adjusts to the size of the cloud environment. We need virtualization security that is consistent with virtual mobility and automatic scaling.

Alert Logic Company solves this problem by working closely with key suppliers. For example, the company has collaborated with VMware to consolidate its NSX network virtualization technology, which provides alert logic with better visibility into network traffic and helps the company identify network threats: Alert logic can capture traffic at the hypervisor level, You can also expand your monitoring capacity based on the growth of your VMware environment.

Large data, complex security situation, and the role of automation

Now that more flexible and dynamic virtualization and cloud hosting environments generate massive amounts of network traffic and data, security administrators and vendors need to filter this data, for example, Alert logic has more than 2PB of customer log data.

"We need to filter a lot of data to tell customers which data in their logs is security-related," he says, and that big data is another issue that cloud security providers must address. The enterprise does not have enough space to store the data. Those responsible for security-whether they are managed service providers or internal security administrators-must be able to "turn this data into operational intelligence", and many companies are investing a lot of real and money in this area.

The complexity of the security environment does not make this job easier. You will find that network security often involves isolated solutions, some software, some hardware. These solutions often produce more data to make large data analysis more difficult. In many cases, these solutions are difficult to deploy to the cloud environment, and cloud security providers must strive to simplify security so that security can be expanded and used more easily.

Alert logic attempts to provide customers with tools to automate the deployment of their services, in the same way that customers can deploy virtualized computing or storage infrastructures. "We built a lot of APIs to do this, and the same tools you see in DevOps, like chef and puppet, you can use here as well." "Security vendors need to make their cloud products as easy to deploy as computing and storage."

Why is cloud security lagging behind?

In Govshteyn's view, the security industry is lagging behind other parts of the network from a cloud perspective, not because of concerns about digital privacy but because of the industry's "inertia". There are still not many large security providers that can provide viable and credible security products, leaving a lot of catch-up space for startups. Traditional security firms will be bound by a large number of traditional products.

He expects more competitiveness in the industry. When businesses want to move more quickly to a cloud environment, they may be able to lift their feet on security issues.