Considerations When Creating a Secure Cloud Environment

The largest reported attack in 2014 was 400Gbps, with other large reported events at 300, 200 and 170Gbps with a further six respondents reporting events over the 100Gbps threshold. Ten years ago, the largest attack was 8 Gbps.

Firewalls and IPS devices continue to be targets for attackers. According to the report, over one third of organizations had firewall or IPS devices experience a failure or contribute to an outage during a DDoS attack.

Security incidents are up but enterprises are not fully prepared to respond. The report points out that just over one third of respondents indicated an increase in security incidents this year, with about half indicating similar levels to last year. 40 percent of respondents felt reasonably or well prepared for a security incident, with 10 percent feeling completely unprepared to respond to an incident.

Cloud and VM-level security. Imagine scanning a VM siting on your hypervisor for malicious code, malware, viruses, and other security holes. Now, imagine doing so without actually deploying any client. VM-level security means direct integration into the hypervisor layer. Furthermore, you increase the performance of your virtual machines without having to sacrifice levels of security. At the very basic level – you are now creating a very powerful cloud security methodology by allowing your VMs to directly integrate with your security solution. When working with cloud – always ensure that your network and data points are all secure. At the VM level, you can create access control policies which scale between on premise and cloud systems.

Cloud means multi-tenancy, services, user experiences and management. Remember, cloud also means being ready for some high levels of multi-tenancy. Your virtual infrastructure must support a large number of users all sharing resources. This is why when it comes to cloud security, virtual machine and resource isolation and control is critical. Based on policies and configuration templates – you’re able to segment your hypervisor as well as you VMs to better control the flow of data throughout your cloud. Furthermore, you can control data delivery as well as QoS based on the classification of the workload. This level of flexibility also creates integrated security which allows you to better control a variety of data sets and applications. The most critical point to remember here is that security within cloud is not a unilateral solution. Rather, effective cloud security is a collection of security tools impacting various cloud use-cases.

Enforcing compliance and security for your cloud. What if you could enforce PCI-DSS, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance all from one management plane – all for your own cloud environment? You can now integrate on premise resources with a respective cloud ecosystem. However, make sure your cloud provider is up to par when it comes to hosting compliance and regulation workloads. Specific providers have, for example, signed their business associate agreements (BAA) to be able to process protected healthcare (PHI) information. Others have created powerful ecommerce gateway platforms for PCI-compliant workloads. Compliance aside, your cloud will require advanced levels of security and management. Security technologies are capable of controlling virtual machines, application and resource security attributes, and the virtual networks they are utilizing. This translates to a lot of granular control – all from one management plane.