According to Rod Stuhlmuller, VP of solutions marketing at Aviatrix, the company utilizes native cloud platform features and its own technology to give businesses a centralized look into the security of their cloud workloads and the flexibility to send out the same guidelines to different clouds.
"The architecture is really what's new, not necessarily the capabilities of each of the features[…]It's very different than having to reroute traffic to some centralized inspection point for whatever security capabilities you're talking about — that just becomes very complex and expensive to do," he said.
According to a survey by Flexera, “Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report,” a vast majority of companies (87%) have switched to a multicloud architecture, with the majority (72%) adopting a hybrid strategy that integrates both private cloud infrastructure and public cloud services. According to Flexera, managing multicloud architectures and securing cloud infrastructure are among the top concerns for businesses, with 80% and 78% of them grappling, respectively.
Security may suffer if businesses distribute workloads among numerous cloud service providers (CSPs). According to Patrick Coughlin, vice president of technical go-to-market for Splunk, a data and insights cloud platform, companies may rapidly lose visibility into the security of their cloud infrastructure because CSPs handle security policies, traffic inspection, and workload deployment differently.
Initially, many providers built virtual versions of their firewall appliances and used them as entry points to cloud infrastructure, but John Grady, principal analyst for cybersecurity at Enterprise Strategy Group, says that managing those virtual firewalls has gotten harder, especially when using multiple cloud platforms.
"Virtual firewall instances have been around for a while, but there's been an acknowledgement over the last couple of years that these deployments can be complex and cumbersome and don't take advantage of the key benefits the cloud offers[…] we've seen a general shift toward more cloud-native network security solutions," says Stuhlmuller.
Finding a solution to the expanding complexity is essential as more enterprises use numerous infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions from the leading cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
By employing their native security groups, Aviatrix, for instance, enables businesses to develop an abstracted policy that can be applied across all cloud platforms without the administrator having to visit each one. The number of containers and virtual machines that need to be upgraded for businesses with expanding workloads, driven by microservice-based software architecture, can soar, according to Stuhlmuller.
"It's not that we're putting firewalls everywhere, but we're putting the inspection and enforcement capability into the network into the natural path of traffic, with a [single management console] that allows us to do central creation of policy but push that distributed inspection enforcement out everywhere in the network," he says.
Forrester Research lists Palo Alto Networks, Trellix, Trend Micro, Rapid7, and Check Point Software Technologies as additional significant vendors that concentrate on cloud workload security, but with various approaches to the technologies.
The future of Zero Trust security relies greatly on next-generation firewalls (NGFWs). NGFWs are classified by Gartner Research as "deep packet inspection firewalls that incorporate software inspection, intrusion prevention, and the injection of intelligence from outside the firewall in addition to protocol inspection and blocking." As per Gartner, an NGFW should not be mistaken for a standalone network intrusion prevention system (IPS) that combines a regular firewall and an uncoordinated IPS in the same device.
Azure Active Directory has received a handful of security updates from Microsoft. In preview, the business has unveiled a new access reviews tool that allows enterprises to delete inactive user accounts which may pose a security concern. Users who created the new Azure AD tenant after October 2019 received security defaults, however, customers who built Azure AD tenants before October 2019 did not receive security defaults.
Police in Lithuania is investigating after the personal information of 110,000 individuals was leaked to an online hacker site. The car-sharing service, CityBee, affirmed the records and data of thousands of its clients had been undermined in the incident. The first part of the database was posted on February 15 and incorporates 110,000 CityBee client IDs, usernames, hashed passwords, complete names, as well as personal codes (national identification numbers) that belong to mostly Lithuanian CityBee users. The subsequent part, posted on February 16 by the same threat actor, seems to contain more definite personal data, possibly including driver license numbers and CityBee credit limits, as well as a folder named “CreditCards.”
The United States is witnessing major cyberattacks, multiple government departments’ agencies are being targeted including treasury and commerce departments, homeland security and now Microsoft is the latest victim of a cyber attack.