Do your cloud first strategy includes an integrated defense?

By: Atul Anchan, Director Systems Engineering – India, Symantec

Enterprises are amid a fundamental shift in ways that employees and clients are consuming technology. While the tech pendulum continues to swing, chief information security officers must be prepared to swing with it—or get clocked. As enterprises leverage cloud applications and infrastructure at an unseen pace, there is more need than ever to enable stronger protection for your cloud-first strategy. The cloud generation needs a broader and deeper integrated defense to secure against the unknown advanced threats.

The high usage of personally-owned devices, enhanced connectivity offering fast paced internet, and cloud-based computing platforms is making significant changes to the traditional IT landscape while delivering advanced capabilities. While embracing fully outsourced cloud solutions and infrastructure, data and users continue to cross over the recognized corporate security perimeter. Considering the transition, it’s important than ever for CISOs to keep track, secure sensitive company data and maintain compliance as the critical assets flow between on-premise systems, mobile apps and in cloud services. This data might include personal records, protected health information or payment archives.

According to the recent Blue Coat Elastica Shadow Data Report, 23% of all files in cloud apps are broadly shared, and 12% of those files contain sensitive or compliance-related data. Enterprises typically use a variety of point solutions and siloed security tools that don’t protect all the sensitive data, creating security gaps and opening the door to leaks and attacks.

In general security measures offer isolated components of what is required to secure these transformations, thus the cloud generation commands a new model of integrated security. There is a need for CISOs of the modern enterprise to securely enable cloud adoption, while unifying both cloud and traditional on premise environments for seamless security. Moving to cloud poses the challenge of creating fresh policy with each new vendor, which adds a significant burden considering the manual deployment and maintenance. The other significant challenge comes at the data protection aspect.

The Data Protection Challenges

Enterprises must ensure apt security measures for its mobile users and remote operating locations despite geographical restrictions, at the same time, protecting “on-the-move” valuable company data when in transit. Our path breaking Data Loss Prevention (DLP) with its cloud-delivered Web Security Service (WSS), provides a seamless platform to help ensure a safe web experience and to protect organizational data. While we’ll as industry leaders continue to innovate as the transformation grips the organizations.

Cyber criminals are known to target the data rich clouds to make financial gains. New security patterns and practices are emerging to address the challenges in this cloud-based environment. These are based on IT regaining control by setting policies consistently across physical, virtualized, and private cloud, and public cloud infrastructures; acquiring visibility into policy deployment and enforcement; and, finally, auditing those policy controls. Governance, protection, visibility, and auditability are key elements to establishing confidence and trust in the cloud.

A Security Strategy for the Cloud

To narrow the existing gaps and overcome the challenges, companies need a single partner that understands the importance of information security from end to end. In line with this Symantec recently announced a Cloud Security Platform that offers advanced capabilities for securing critical assets, data and users across the cloud continuum, while leveraging the power of Symantec’s category-leading security solutions in their journey to the cloud.

Securing Users and Data Beyond Traditional Borders

· Enterprises must ensure safety for mobile users and remote offices from anywhere in the world while, at the same time, protecting organizational data as it is in transit.

· As users and remote offices move beyond the traditional perimeter, advanced protection must follow them regardless of their location.

· Without proper visibility, control and protection of public cloud workloads, organizational risk is substantially increased as enterprises move to leverage their applications in these cloud environments.

· As enterprises provision new cloud applications and services, it is critical that they secure both their cloud workloads and networked environments for complete application protection

· Symantec’s Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solution now supports Microsoft Azure, which allows organizations to monitor and log user activity while leveraging behavioral analytics and machine learning to detect account breaches.