Canadian Bacon: Cloud Native & Security?

Let’s break this down

Cloud inherently provides multiple security options for consumers to enable with little effort. Although it’s easy to enable, managing these controls becomes difficult at best but let me explain.

First and foremost, each cloud service provider’s controls are nuanced on how they are deployed and managed. Now, leveraging a single cloud service provider may allow you to overcome this challenge, but these native security controls tend to lack advanced capabilities seen in traditional networks. Not to mention that many consumers will start in a single cloud instance and grow into others for a variety of reasons. This includes acquisitions, competitive advantage, or resilience, to name a few. The other challenge that we have as defenders, is a lot of these controls aren’t as mature as some of the other products available in the market for ’traditional’ environments.

What defenders tend to do is leverage traditional skills and products from the data center and migrate that into the cloud service provider. This introduces another set of complexities, because moving a virtual instance of a next generation firewall into the cloud infrastructure does not provide the inherent benefits of cloud. This includes not having the ability to scale the solution as the environment grows, as well as being dependent on configuration tools to create the infrastructure and to configure policies. Another issue is that these virtual instances are operated as infrastructure as a service, which limits our ability to scale and is limited to a high availability deployment that requires additional independent high availability pairs to meet the dynamic nature of cloud.

Ideally, we want to embrace the benefits of cloud and ensure that the controls in place are agnostic to the cloud service provider and scale to the needs of the environment. Cisco provides mechanism that allows security practitioners and network operators to abstract the security elements from the cloud service provider. This ensures cloud native capabilities are in place and the controls are consistent across all cloud service providers you may operate in. This includes Azure, AWS, GCP, and Oracle. Let me introduce you to Cisco Multicloud Defense platform. Cisco’s Multicloud Defense removes the nuance of the cloud service provider and how you deploy while also providing the rich capabilities expected from mature products.

Unified Security Posture: Cisco Multicloud Defense provides a central platform to manage security across multiple cloud environments, offering consistent policies and controls.

Threat Detection and Response: It integrates threat intelligence and advanced analytics to detect and respond to threats in real time, regardless of where they occur in the cloud ecosystem powered by Cisco Talos.

Enhanced Visibility: Cisco’s solution extends visibility across all cloud footprints, enabling you to identify vulnerabilities and potential threats effectively.

Automation and Orchestration:  With automation capabilities, Cisco ensures that security policies are consistently applied and easily managed across different cloud platforms.

Flexibility and Scalability: Cisco Multicloud Defense supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments, allowing organizations to scale their security measures as their cloud infrastructure grows.

This is all accomplished by leveraging the SaaS-based Manager and a PaaS-based gateway that can be deployed in every cloud service provider’s environment, both centralized and/or distributed.

Cisco’s platform as a service gateways scale to the demand of the dynamic cloud infrastructure as needed and have self-healing capabilities. This allows administrators to build policies and objects once and deploy and leverage them using labels within the appropriate cloud service provider environment.

So, no more worry about the nuance of how a control is delivered within the cloud service provider, and no more worry about complex configurations and scaling issues with high availability deployments. Cisco provides the ability within minutes to create all the constructs required to create a centralized or distributed VPC/VNET.

This includes not only the gateways, but all the routing configurations that are required to transfer the traffic into the gateways. This is also an option for distributed or hybrid deployments. This empowers teams to leverage advanced security controls with comprehensive visibility that take advantage of cloud capabilities with limited across the hybrid environment.

Is it time to simplify cloud security without sacrificing security and the inherent benefits of cloud?

Are you struggling with security complexity within a multicloud environment?

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