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The world is quickly moving to cloud computing and virtual infrastructure as a strategy to accelerate IT delivery and drive business agility. This movement is shifting the ground underneath security teams in a big way. These teams now need an answer to what seems like a simple question: “What cloud servers are being attacked and how will I know?” Unfortunately, the answer to these questions isn’t so simple and traditional security tools can’t help much. The elastic, dynamic nature of virtual infrastructure makes it extraordinarily difficult for security teams to have the visibility they need to enforce consistent policies, detect vulnerabilities and react quickly to abnormal behavior.
The bottom line is that you can’t secure what you can’t see. So gaining real-time visibility becomes paramount, especially for organizations looking to leverage all kinds of cloud infrastructure. This situation becomes more complex the more “clouds” the organization leverages, be it public, private, or hybrid, all combined with internal data centers (which aren’t going away any time soon). And that doesn’t include the complications from M&A activities, shadow IT, and more.
So what’s the problem with traditional network security tools delivering visibility in cloud environments? For one, they impose a heavy footprint on each workload so they don’t scale well. And they don’t automatically deploy on systems that are spun up. As a result, organizations end up picking and choosing which servers receive a full set of security coverage. This leaves the majority of their cloud servers vulnerable to attack with no way to see it coming. To gain complete visibility would require endless hours of manual effort, a heavy burden on virtual server performance and a logistical nightmare of multiple tools.
So how should security teams choose a visibility solution that’s right for your unique infrastructure needs? There are lots of solutions on the market today; the best will incorporate these key attributes.
To sum up, if the CSO or compliance officer can’t quickly and accurately see what’s going on across their entire infrastructure, they run the risk of not knowing when they’re being attacked or compromised. Continuous visibility, backed up with comprehensive security functions, is the first step towards improving your security posture, especially when you’re dealing with the dynamic, elastic nature of modern cloud computing environments. The good news is that there are now effective solutions on the market that can help solve the visibility challenge while at the same time enable the movement into all kinds of virtual and cloud infrastructure.