Barracuda

Your journey, secured

Rich Turner

Making sense of the cloud security alphabet

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Note:  This is the final post in a six-part series on public cloud security.  You can follow the entire series here.

What does this alphabet soup mean to you?  The first takeaway is that once you begin leveraging the cloud in an impactful way (multiple workloads, native cloud applications, etc.) you will need to look beyond perimeter security.  There are a number of solutions to consider, from those which look for threats and threat potentials (SIEM tools) to those that establish a security posture (CSPM tools).  And there is the intermediary step, workload protection (CWPP).  Which do you need?

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Protection implied and complied

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Note:  This is the fifth in a six-part series on public cloud security.  You can follow the entire series here.

CSPM  – Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solutions are the latest wave in the quest to protect cloud workloads and keep customers secure.  CSPM solutions evaluate cloud infrastructure and identify misconfigurations or violations to an organizations’ “best practices.”  By doing so, they identify issues that could lead to data breaches or leakage, as well as play a role in compliance.

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Protecting the cloud, one event at a time

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Note:  This is the fourth in a six-part series on public cloud security.  You can follow the entire series here.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions often predate CWWP ones – these products were logical extensions of standard network reporting.  SEIM solutions focus on the analysis event data in real time for early detection of targeted attacks and data breaches.  They also collect, aggregate, and report on this data, primarily for incident response, forensics, and regulatory compliance requirements.

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Protecting the cloud, one workload at a time

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Note:  This is the third in a six-part series on public cloud security.  You can follow the entire series here.

As companies deployed multiple workloads in the cloud, those with networking background began to question whether existing security was naturally extensible to these new workloads.  Security vendors responded with CWPP – Cloud Workload Protection Platforms.

These solutions are defined as work-load centric security protection solutions.  They usually deploy an agent, and address server workload protection in hybrid architectures.  An example would be a hybrid data center with both on-premises or physical and virtual machines, and potentially multi-cloud IaaS infrastructures.  Most also support container-based application architectures (i.e., Docker and Kubernetes).  So far, sounds perfect.

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Planes and clouds

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Note:  This is the second in a six-part series on public cloud security.   You can follow the entire series here.

The Control Plane, Data Plane, and Management Plane are terms that come from the on-premises networking world, to explain in very simple terms how IP Packets move from A to Z.  In the world of the cloud, the traditional network becomes amorphous:  the cloud vendors perform these network functions as part of their cloud fabric.  One would think they’re no longer relevant.

That’s not the case, unfortunately, and IT professionals working with the cloud need to understand how the concept of planes evolves in the cloud ecosystem, especially as they share certain aspects of security with the cloud vendors (the much-discussed Shared Security Model to which all major cloud providers adhere).

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