DevOps.com sits down with Mark Nunnikhoven, VP Cloud Research at Trend Micro. We discuss hybrid cloud, hybrid cloud security, DevSecOps and more. Mark is very involved in research on the latest threats and trends in cloud security. This is a great interview that I think you will find very interesting.
As usual, the transcript of our conversation follows:
Alan Shimel: Hi, this is Alan Shimel, DevOps.com, here for another DevOps chat, and I’m joined today by Mark Nunnikhoven of Trend Micro. Mark, welcome to DevOps Chat.
Nunnikhoven: Thanks for having me, Alan.
Shimel: I hope I didn’t mangle your name too bad, did I?
Nunnikhoven: No, it was perfect. It’s a tricky one. It looks really menacing, but ends up being relatively simple after you’ve heard it a few hundred times, so –
Shimel: Absolutely, very good. So, Mark, I asked you to join us today—I think we had done a webinar and talked a bit offline about, you know, some of the challenges around securing hybrid cloud and, you know, versus obviously people moving stuff to the cloud, people still have stuff in their data center, and what’s good for one may not necessarily be good for the other, but what’s good for both might be an entirely different thing. And I wanted to just spend a little bit of time with you talking about the challenges of securing the hybrid cloud.
Nunnikhoven: Yeah, it’s definitely an interesting topic that I don’t think gets enough attention, so I’m glad we can have this chat.
Shimel: Yep. Before we jump into it, though, Mark, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give you a chance to just let people know, I did mention you’re with Trend Micro, but what is your role there?
Nunnikhoven: Yeah, I’m the vice president in charge of cloud research. So I look at how organizations are tackling security in the cloud, in hybrid environments for, you know, traditional servers and workloads, containers, serverless, sort of anything that’s breaking new ground. It’s a lot of fun and there’s a lot of really interesting stuff happening.
Shimel: Great. So, Mark, you know, I think I started us off by saying there’s people who are making solutions for the cloud, there’s people making solutions for the data center, the ARM RAM. And what’s good for one is not necessarily good for the other, and then, of course, most of the world is living in some sort of hybrid environment.
Nunnikhoven: Yeah.
Shimel: What do we do?
Nunnikhoven: [Laughs] That’s a great question, ’cause, you know, I’ve seen—working with organizations around the world, I’ve seen sort of all of the possible scenarios, I think at least the major ones that people kind of come to thinking might work, and they sort of range from we’re going to force data center processes and controls into the cloud, which is a recipe for disaster. You know, they’re very different environments, to the opposite, of we’re gonna take everything that’s working in the cloud and we’re gonna force it on the data center, to, you know, we’re gonna run two completely different environments in completely different ways, and essentially double the workload. None of those is really satisfactory. Sort of the best route forward tends to be looking at what’s working in the cloud and trying to push a lot of those concepts into the data center. But you still need to make adjustments for the reality that the data center is very, you know, sort of slow and very high level of rigor and very formulaic, and, you know, very well-established. So you do need to make adjustments, but, you know, the goal is to get one way of doing things with allowances for the difference in both environments.
Shimel: Yep. And Mark, as you said, that may be the goal, but, you know, from day one, you obviously—you need a plan to get there. And can you maybe share with our audience a little bit, where do you see the logical steps, if you will, to getting there?
Nunnikhoven: Yeah, and I think that’s a really good way to phrase it, you know, because we can all—we all love the architecture Powerpoints and you go the events and you get real excited about what the eventual design and implementation will look like. But getting there can be really ugly and really messy. I think the biggest thing, and it’s unfortunately the thing that people tend to forget about, is looking at not just the security, but the operations processes and controls that you’re using today, and why you’re using them. And I think that’s the big piece that people miss, is, you know, why am I using something like an intrusion prevention system, or why am I using anti-malware or why do I have this change review board for any sort of operational change I want to make. And once you start to dig into the why you do these things, you realize that the implementation can change, as long as you’re still meeting that why.
So, you know, we put intrusion prevention in place so that we make sure that any time we open up traffic to this server, that we verified it is actually secure web traffic like we’re expecting. Once you know that’s the reason, then you can look and say in my data center, that makes sense to have a big perimeter appliance doing that job, whereas in the cloud, it makes more sense to have something running on the host, doing that same job. So you’re still getting the same answer to why. It’s just the how is different in each environment. So it’s—you’ve got to dig into those, and it starts to clarify what you’re doing.
Shimel: Got it. Mark, what are we seeing—I mean, what—obviously at Trend, you’re probably talking with a lot of customers. Are they coming from the cloud down with their solution? In other words, buying a cloud solution and building—or from the data center up, if you will?
Nunnikhoven: A lot of the time we’re seeing the data center up, simply because it’ll be one team within a larger organization. So we’re talking mainly, you know, traditional enterprise and large governments. And it’ll be one team that’s gone and said we’re gonna push everything and build it new in the cloud, and when they start to kick off that process, they start to get a lot of existing policy and existing culture enforced on them. So they’ll get, you know, specifically the security. They’ll get people saying, well, you need this, you need to make sure that, you know, you go across these boundaries in your design, you’re networking a certain way. So they start to try to take those same designs, which are great in the data center, but horrible in the cloud, and they try to push those into the cloud, and they usually end up failing. And then about six months afterwards realize that they need to take a new approach, because it is a completely different environment.
Shimel: Got it. And, you know what, Mark, I’m a firm believer that at least for the foreseeable future, five, 10 years, hybrid cloud is the—is the dominant, right, the dominant usage pattern that we’ll see from people. Is this yours as well?
Nunnikhoven: Yeah, 100 percent. And for me, it’s simple economics. As much as you want to be in the cloud, if that’s the case, if bought in even, you know, you’ll see it at the major events from the big cloud providers. They’ll pull up big enterprises who are—their CEO or the CIO is, you know, yelling from the top of their lungs that they’re gonna be all in on the cloud. Even in those scenarios, they’re still going to take 12 to 18 months to move out of their data centers.
But the reality is most enterprises have already made a multimillion dollar investment in technology that’s working. It might not be working as fast as they want, but you can’t walk away from that. The cost savings in the cloud, if they’re there, are not that significant that you’re gonna leave millions on the table. So the reality is, you know, for a standard data center life cycle, so like you said, a five to seven year term, you’re gonna be dealing with two environments. And it’s not just that it’s two environments, it’s two environments that are completely different. It’s very much apples and oranges. So you do need a different approach.
Shimel: Got it. And, Mark, I don’t want to put you on the spot, but what Trend Micro specifically, what kind of solutions are you guys, you know, working with customers on?
Nunnikhoven: Yeah, so one of our big push, and we’ll just hit it real brief, because we don’t want it to be a sales pitch at all, it’s just we have a platform called Deep Security, and we built it with the principle of trying to put security as close to the data and application as possible. And because of that, we’ve been able to adapt it for multiple cloud use, for data center use, for the hybrid scenario quite well, because we’ve taken a lot of the principles that work in the cloud and made it so that you can leverage them where it makes sense in the data center. So a lot of automation, a lot of programmability, and a lot of intelligence in the products so you don’t have to worry about the nitty-gritty of dealing with security day to day, unless it’s really urgent and requires you to intervene.
Shimel: Excellent. And, I mean, Trend is obviously not the only one doing this, Mark. When we talk about cloud too, I wanted to ask you this, public versus private clouds, where are you seeing this kind of—you know, are we—you know, to me, a private cloud is—goes hand in hand with hybrid, right? But there are people who are doing public cloud and data center, and that’s hybrid as well.
Nunnikhoven: Yeah, and I find for me, you know, private was a real big push back from a lot of the incumbent data center vendors, and, you know, we’ve kind of gotten out of that hype phase and into the reality of it. And I tend to see what a private cloud is, is somebody who’s taken the data center and adapted a lot of the cloud processes and the ideas behind a public cloud and implemented them within their data center, which can be a really good thing. So you can get on-demand resources, so you just query in API instead of sending out a ticket and getting a bunch of people to do work. You know, getting that accountability, getting that accessibility and that visibility that we’re used to in the public cloud, getting that in the data center.
So I think the ideal hybrid scenario is leveraging private cloud/public cloud. A lot of people aren’t there with their data center, because implementing change takes a long time. There’s a lot of cultural change, a lot of tooling change. So you’ll see them with sort of more the traditional data center approach. But if they want to be successful over the next few years, they need to start pushing more of those private cloud ideas internally, because that will help them have one set of processes and tools across both the public and the private cloud.
Shimel: Makes sense, makes sense. And Mark, what about people, though, who just say, you know what, I’m—I’m biting the bullet, I’m just gonna do cloud, you know, or I’m just gonna do data center. You know, first of all, nothing is forever, obviously, right? You could say that today, but things change. Is the Trend Micro solution, specifically, let’s say, is it one that will work with one, but that scales to the other? Or, in other words, how do we stay out of dead ends?
Nunnikhoven: Yeah, and specifically from us, this is something we’ve been dealing with with our customers over the last few years, because we’ve got customers who are 99 percent in the cloud and 1 percent in a data center somewhere, and the exact opposite. And it really—you know, every culture and enterprise is unique in what their blend and their mix of those environments is. So having the tool be agnostic to that is really important. So, you know, we’ll scale from protecting one system, to protecting 100,000 systems, with the same platform, very, very easily.
And I think there are a lot of projects out there, you know, not just commercial offerings from Trend Micro, but we’re seeing this a lot in the operational monitoring space. So, you know, things like Ryman or Logstaff, which are two great open source projects to help you correlate data, they work equally well in the cloud as they do in the data center, and I think that’s really a big win for people, is that you need to put the assets in the environment that makes the most sense, but you should be able to use modern tools in both. And that’s a real big, important point for people to take away, is that you want to be—even if you’re in a traditional sort of slowing evolving data center environment, you want to be making sure that you’re leveraging some of the great advances we’ve made in security and in operational tools.
Shimel: Excellent, excellent. Mark, we’re coming near the end of our time, as this always seems to go quick. But let’s talk a little bit about the research that you’ve been doing, and just give our audience maybe a little insight. What are you kind of researching now? What do you find really interesting?
Nunnikhoven: Yeah, the biggest area I’m focusing on right now is the rise of what’s been deemed the serverless architecture. So obviously sort of a poor choice of names. There are servers somewhere. But it’s the idea of leveraging a function as a service as something like Microsoft du jour functions or AWS Lambda, where you’ve just got code that you input that runs in a sandbox on someone else’s system and you don’t have to worry about any of that. So scaling and operational tasks are kind of out the door, but these are heavily leveraging SaaS services and you’re sort of picking the best aspects of multiple providers, and stitching it together into one big application. And there’s a lot of really interesting advantages for the business there, because you’re focusing purely on delivering value to your users.
But from a security perspective, now you’ve got multiple parties and systems that you have to trust, that have to work together, that have to share security controls, and then that is normally only one application in a suite of others. So you’ve got serverless applications, you’ve got applications that are running on containers, and then traditional applications. So I’ve been looking at not just the serverless, but how you do you address all of these in a consistent manner, so that you can apply security to the data where it’s being processed.
Shimel: Excellent. Mark, we are butting up against time here, but one last question, and it’s one I frequently ask our guests here on DevOps Chat. If you had to recommend one book to our audience to read, not necessarily the last book you read or anything like that, but one book they should read, what’s your recommendation?
Nunnikhoven: Yeah, that’s always a tough question. I love reading, so I’m always reading three or four books at a time. And, you know, it’s a safe assumption that this audience has already read “The Phoenix Project.” If they haven’t, they should. My latest favorite in this space is called “The Art of Monitoring.” It’s by James Turnbull, and it’s a look at how to implement metrics and measurements around running applications, regardless of where they are. So it talks about logging, it talks about real-time alerting, and it’s a really great approach, in that, you know, it’s always looking at results. So not just collecting data for data’s sake, but it sort of walks you through how all of this stuff should roll up to give your teams some actionable insight on how your application is doing. It’s a really great book.
Shimel: Got it, interesting. Well, Mark, thank you so much for being this episode’s guest, of DevOps Chat. We’d like to maybe have you back on sometime and talk to us about more of the research you’re doing. Continued success to you and Trend Micro, and just thanks again. This is Alan Shimel, for DevOps Chat, and thanks for joining us. Until next time.
