Not All Clouds Have A Silver Lining

Anyone who has been in the cloud security business for almost three decades knows what is happening out there. And that would be this – infrastructure is changing. We had data centres, but now we are moving to both private (such as Microsoft Azure) and public (like Cisco) clouds. It is all changing from centralised locations to hundreds of different sites, and this has seen a surge in demand for security services. Services which have evolved from monolithic to microservices, and these are but some of the new architectures. Habits are also changing raising different security requirements from to software-as-a-service SaaS applications. The big picture shows a life cycle that is growing faster with shorter timelines to develop apps placing security needs everywhere.

The threat landscape, observes Ozan Oguz, Regional Cloud Security Architect, EMEA, is also changing with the data centres as part of the physical world waiting to be protected from the bad guys. At the same time, in the public and private cloud scenarios, we have new attack vectors.

In some instances, we also have security posture misconfigurations (defined as failing to implement all the security controls for a server or web application, or enforcing the security controls, but doing so with errors). According to Gartner, in the next two years, 95 percent of hacking issues are going to be happening because of the customer’s fault. They will be configuring stuff and spinning up environments using automated tools like terraform. Most of the time they are using a black screen, and they are also copying and pasting some configuration from the previous configuration and making mistakes. To err is human nature sometimes.

Introducing new attack vectors 

“These errors,” Ozan points out, “actually create a new attack vector in public and private cloud platforms because hackers are constantly checking for those wrongdoings or wrong configurations. If someone creates an account in Azure platform for instance and forgets to disable the public exposure or forgets to enable encryption, this is a new attack vector.” Gartner reaffirms this citing that “the challenge exists not in the security of the cloud itself, but in the policies and technologies for security and control of the technology. In nearly all cases, it is the user, not the cloud provider, who fails to manage the controls used to protect an organisation’s data.”

Having been in the market for almost 30 years, Check Point has eight different cloud security products under Check Point CloudGuard, a new family of cloud security products “designed to prevent the latest fifth-generation (Gen V) multi-vector and polymorphic cyberattacks targeting enterprise cloud services.” Their rather robust portfolio, as part of the Infinity architecture, includes CloudGuard SaaS and CloudGuard Infrastructure-as-a-service IaaS workloads and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

Looking at the big picture, we speak about cloud technology and new tools we need to adopt. Most of the time the enterprise is using automation tools. Where one needs to be part of the whole pipeline from developing the code till the production level. Check Point will have some phases in the pipeline where their products perfectly match the pipeline phases their customers are going through.

Check Point CloudGuard SaaS
Organisations seeking to optimise business operations and reduce costs are increasingly moving to cloud applications via SaaS. However, SaaS applications expose businesses to a variety of risks ranging from external threats to unauthorised access of corporate SaaS accounts. CloudGuard SaaS focuses on taking security to the next level by providing complete protection against SaaS account takeovers, sophisticated malware and zero-day threats, sensitive data sharing and even shadow IT.

Check Point CloudGuard Iaas

Process efficiencies and increased network agility are driving IaaS and SDN technology adoption at a rapid pace. But these new infrastructures also present businesses with a unique set of security challenges. Check Point CloudGuard IaaS plays the role of protecting assets with sophisticated Gen V cyber-threats with dynamic scalability, intelligent provisioning and consistent control across physical and virtual networks. CloudGuard IaaS supports the broadest range of public and private cloud platforms including all leading public, private and hybrid cloud platforms.

“We do integrate with public, (Google, Azure) private, (Cisco and Open Stack, and hybrid accounts, the latter which is used often. Say you have Cisco ICI and Azure, this is a hybrid cloud consuming different cloud platforms at the same time. We are offering the same service offered by private and public cloud vendors and you don’t need to create native objects manually as you are consuming the services.”

This enables a layer 7 protection in your environment in the cloud subscription that you are consuming to enable N/S and E/W data point security. “We inspect the package in real-time according to the policy created. The management is consolidated for existing customers such that it is straightforward for the client to keep using it. This turns it into a central management system that unifies any platform the client has.”

Have a more in-depth look at our webinar.