Pack Your Bags, We’re Going On A Trip

Are you ready? Good, let’s take a journey into your new cloud-infused business. But first, you may have your wits about you, if you’ve come unprepared. Information and awareness are your sidekicks and it’s imperative to have them stacked in your armoury. Matan Burstein, Checkpoint Security Engineering Manager(Africa) attuned to the fact that, “Enterprises, connectivity and security needs are evolving, and exceedingly much more because of Covid.” Enterprises are becoming highly distributed because of the social restrictions and having to work from home. There is a rise of application use and remote user access through reliance of technology to close the space and ensure continuance of business and this consequently leaves a lot of room for susceptibility of vulnerability. This steadily leads to the increasing need for security and protection as you’re not only open, but prone to risks.

There are three main avenues of adoption and adaptation that businesses go through in the cloud environment. A business that is network and infrastructure centric, whereby companies barely migrate to the cloud and are persistent with on-premise servers, relishing in a more traditional customer service through use of legacy applications. The transitional/ hybrid phase where, instead of a firm picking one side of the fence, they dangle freely between both and actually stay there. These are firms that adopt the cloud process but perhaps don’t see to it that they fully adapt. Keeping one leg into the cloud and the other in local servers… as both cater to and respond to different needs of the organization and are used as such. The cloud centric firms are third. These are companies that have jumped on the bandwagon and are transitioning fruitfully through this transportation. On the transformation scale, where do you lie?

All systems can be rendered moot if there is no security to sufficiently sustain them. This journey must be synonymous with the air of security and protection. There are four structural pillars that form the bundle of protection that cover this; Securing the cloud, securely connecting to the cloud, device security and consolidated security.

Firstly, we step into the first pillar which is securing the cloud. Through Checkpoints’s CloudGaard IAAS, cloud network security and advanced threat prevention are inherent aspects operating within public, private and hybrid cloud environments. These aspects atone for several features including firewalls, IPS, DLP, Application Control, IPsec VPN, Antivirus and Anti-bot.

Coming on this journey with us, is your own personal bodyguard. How fitting, you’re lucky. The CloudGuard Dome9 is your iron-clad protector from the ghouls. An automation tool fit for governance, security and compliance for public clouds and Kubernetes environments. In his weaponry; complete visibility into all assets, workloads and security policies across virtual networks, regions and accounts on AWS, Azure, GCP and K8S, continuous enforcement of regulatory compliance standards and active protection against vulnerabilities, identity theft, data loss, and accidental or unauthorized changes.

Your business is now cloud-infused, and with lots of room to move around in a secure environment, trickles into four different tiers. At the deepest level, is your data center tier which is a data warehouse, hosting all your data on cloud instead of on-premise. The second tier is the Business Logic level which houses the private cloud components such as CRM and payment gateways, the web & application tier which encases the public cloud and finally the customer tier which concerns the end-user.

The second pillar to this protective layer is securing connectivity to the cloud. This secure connection carries through from HQ and branch offices to remote users and all SaaS applications. This three-step ahead process is completed in three main areas. Through ‘cloud cover’ in regard to cloud connectivity to all managed devices for employees, unmanaged devices for contractors and home devices and browser protection for direct internet access. “CloudGaard Connect offers a comprehensive a sassy, SASE Solution to ensure you securely connect to everything,” states Matan.

This is achieved seamlessly through unified consolidation with 11 security products, features truly built to prevent zero-day attacks with NSS-tested 100% catch rate and a user-centric nature, offering a great and easy user experience through high performance security. The cloud service delivers; prevention from malware and zero-day threats from attacking SaaS users, elimination of the top SaaS threat by blocking account hijacks, instant visibility into unauthorized SaaS activity as it “shows exactly whose authorized, whose not authorized, whose trying to access, when is he trying to access and from where,” stated Mr.Burstein. Lastly, protection of shared files and sensitive organization data from being sent out or leaked.

“It is protection from anything, to anywhere, using anything,” he says. Supported by the third pillar which encapsulates device security through the endpoint, Mobile, EDR and IoT. With an upward flick of your wand and a spell at the tip of your tongue, the SandBlast Agent is your magical wand as you navigate through the threat landscape, afterall there is always a little taste of danger in every journey. This is complete endpoint security solution offering a fleet of advanced endpoint threat prevention capabilities. From anti-bot, exploit and ransomware, to forensics, threat emulation and extraction, behavioral guard and finally zero-phishing.

The last pillar as we move forward on this journey is consolidated security. How to make sure everything communicates, integrates and operates in the best way possible. This points us in the direction of Checkpoint’s single-console unified policy that incorporates all users, devices, content, apps, gateways, private & public clouds into a secured and connected web. This completes the journey but in no way completes the means. Why re-imagine your cloud enabled business, when you can make it a reality?