Times change, clouds change, costs change and business needs change. What’s right for you now may not be right for you next year. What works for your security “on-prem” now, may not work in the cloud at all. If it does work in the cloud, you are likely to need even more cloud-specific licensing. If you’re licensed for one cloud, you’ll need licensing for another, and so on. Your company may merge, acquire, be acquired and security may have to start all over. Vendor lock-in can be very restrictive, very expensive, or both.
Moving to the cloud is supposed to bring lower costs, greater scalability, better flexibility and other benefits.
With these benefits comes an issue. Security is not the cloud providers’ problem. It’s not part of their offering, it’s not their expertise, and the you touch it, you break, you fix it type mantra is often buried in the small-print of your cloud provider’s contract.
Just because you have a cloud provider, cyber security is not “fixed”. Security challenges abound and must be addressed quickly. Attacks are often automated and humans can’t keep up. The automation of attack is gaining traction and organizations therefore need to deploy automation to fight automation. One way to create instant security maturity when moving to the cloud is to work with a managed security service provider (MSSP).
Security Challenges
As with any solution, MSSP or otherwise, moving to the cloud expands the potential attack surface, especially omni-cloud. The flexibility brings complexity. Retro-fitting security is high risk. The dynamic nature of the cloud reduces the time it takes to deliver services, but security must be included in that initial service, and it must be deployable, tuned and readied, before that service goes live.
The advantage of contracting an MSSP, one that offers a cloud native cyber security threat protection platform, is that you can easily apply security-as-a-service (SECaaS) to mitigate these challenges from day one.
Rather than deploying many legacy or disparate systems from many legacy or disparate vendors, your cloud security must be easily integrated with other cloud-based frameworks and with other security solutions deployed elsewhere, on-prem, off-prem or hybrid. Simplified integration with other security solutions and systems deployed elsewhere must be available straight out of the box.
What you need is an ANSWER!
If an MSSP offering fits your business, one of the biggest requirements you‘ll have to insist on is threat analytics, insights and visibility. This piece is key.
What you really don’t need is a multitude of systems and services delivering more data than you can handle or ever hope to analyse. Worse, what you really don’t want is an MSSP who has no insights or analytics, or tries to make a quick dollar out of sending some useless reports, once a quarter.
When an effective SECaaS solution is configured correctly, the best report is one that highlights an attack and shows how it has already been mitigated. Security visualization, network visualization and an attack view are key metrics to ensure you have visibility across your entire network and infrastructure, including threat correlation and proof of an automated response and remediation, even if your MSSP is providing the service. It’s your budget, it’s your attack, and it’s your threat insight!
Omni-cloud, don’t be afraid
Done right, SECaaS can provide the correct cyber-security for an omni-cloud strategy. Data, applications and workflows will continue to move across and between platforms, and services will need to be dynamic and flexible. Your security has to be able to automatically adjust as your cloud services shift and expand.