Cloud security is hard. The only security responsibility that is shifted to the cloud vendor is physical security – secure data centers, redundant power, etc. All the logical security requirements and challenges remain the responsibility of the customer:
And there are additional challenges related to cloud computing – the same business benefits that lead to cloud adoption create security challenges:
The ability to create, modify, and destroy cloud resources at will with API calls or a click of a button results in a very dynamic environment that can be challenging to keep up with. Being aware of all changes, understanding security implications of all changes, and responding to security issues at the same pace of change.
Single enterprise data centers have been replaced with tens or even hundreds of cloud accounts. Each application team manages unique accounts for their projects and even a single team is likely to have multiple cloud accounts for their different development stages (dev, test, stage, production). This requires continuous visibility across many cloud accounts – each with the as much complexity as a traditional data center with compute, storage, and networking resources.
Multiple cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, and more) can all be in use in a single enterprise. The homogeneous infrastructure of the enterprise data center that provided consistency and commonality has been replaced with flexibility. Even within a single cloud vendor, each application team may implement completely unique technologies and architecture in their “private” cloud accounts.
62% of security professionals recognize misconfigurations as the biggest security threat.
SSS Info was founded on the idea that “cloud changes everything.” By its very nature, cloud breaks traditional security approaches of static networks protected by firewalls that take weeks to implement a change. Networks are dynamic, changes are automated, infrastructure is now controlled by developers without need for security approval. But this doesn’t have to mean worse security.
Security must embrace the advantages of cloud versus fearing the challenges. The same capabilities that make the cloud agile and scalable for developers are available to security. At the core of these capabilities is automation. Automating discovery, assessment, alerting, and response can put security in control in ways never possible in the traditional data center.
And that is what SSS Info is all about. Understanding the disruption cloud brings to IT in general and security specifically, embracing this change, and responding to it with a new operational paradigm. A paradigm that embraces automation as a solution to security challenges, not a risk. Accepts change as constant. Deals with security findings in real-time, not as monthly reports. This is all about Ops. This is who we are.
For many customers, the first step is understanding the scope of the problem, which is why we also built cloud assessment capability into our product. But where others stopped, we saw assessment as simply a necessary first step to address the real challenge of security operations.
We make actions a central component of our product and embed recommended actions into every discovered issue, which can be triggered and executed with a single-click, or fully automated. Whether the user chooses to setup an Op to remediate an issue or not, the platform makes the action accessible on every issue to run interactively. We don’t measure our customer’s success on the number of issues discovered, but instead by the number of issues resolved.
