decrypting myths
Replication
of risk
To safeguard the
longevity of any fluid
security strategy, ongoing
cyberhygiene processes
designed to reduce risk and
compliance violations are also
important to take into account. Often,
there’s a tendency for teams to ‘set
it and forget it’ during deployments
because cloud services often have
short life cycles. This is a habit that
needs to be wiped out: it simply
doesn’t work well with the way that
DevOps teams are set up.
Work conducted by DevOps
professionals is founded on
replication. This relates to their
activities – say, replicating the
simple creation of container-based
services, the move from image to
instance, and so on – but it also
means that risk can be easily
replicated within cloud services on a
faster and wider scale that it would
do within on-premise infrastructure.
Amrit Williams, Vice President of Products
at Skybox Security
compliance, the testing of accessibility,
security tags, cloud firewall rules and
configurations by security teams is also
a necessity.
These scenarios all illustrate how
beneficial a hybrid environment model
can really be.
Offline models can be regularly
updated via application programming
interface (API) connections, which
means that security and operations
teams do not need administrative
access to cloud platforms.
When this is in place, security teams can
complete necessary tasks with minimal
disruption to the deployment of the
cloud. If a violation or risk were to be
identified, the problem can be removed
when security and operations teams
report back to DevSecOps and perform
necessary amends together.
That’s why cloud services should
be treated with the same careful
consideration that is given to other
areas of the infrastructure, even if
the processes and tools that need
to be used to achieve that vigilance
are different.
Making sure the data handling and
unified management processes
described above become the standard
is the only way to guarantee the future
security of hybrid networks.
By taking a fluid approach to security,
the right foundations will be in place
to support an established programme
ready to cope with today’s challenges
and to support innovation going
forward. While cloud is now viewed as
a ‘must-have’ technology, innovation is
being spun-up so quickly that dynamic
computing could be a very different
beast in a matter of years. u
www.intelligentciso.com | Issue 24
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