devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: Cloud Security

  • Mastering the Shared Responsibility Model

    Mastering the Shared Responsibility Model

    It’s no secret that cloud-native application development is growing exponentially, with Agile development, IaaS and PaaS from providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, enabling innovation at a pace that is challenging for security to keep up with. 

    A global pandemic and the resulting remote work mandates have only accelerated this movement. And with this change in distributed work and agile application development comes greater security considerations—and a higher degree of risk to the business. Security in the cloud is a shared responsibility, but too many organizations find it difficult to fully understand their role in the security of their applications. There are many elements of securing cloud-native applications that cannot be delegated. They require careful attention as part of a risk-based application security program that extends from design to development throughout their application development life cycle.

    With the appropriate visibility, risk-based thinking and automation, cloud-native applications have the ability to be more secure than ever, while enabling faster development and delivery at the same time. But to get to this point, organizations need to understand their responsibilities. 

    Cloud infrastructure security and compliance are necessities for ensuring how applications and data are deployed and operated in the cloud. But what about what is in those applications? Applications are made up of lines of application/infrastructure code and open source libraries built by developers, DevOps, product managers, security champions and other roles. 

    How do we know the components that make up the application are effectively secured? It is too late and not enough to solely rely on a secure cloud posture. Reducing risk early in the development lifecycle will dramatically reduce costs and business risk. Some sources have assessed the cost impact of fixing a risk in early production to be four to five times as much as one uncovered during design, and up to 100 times more than one identified in the maintenance phase.

    Modern applications are delivered through sophisticated “plumbing” of secure cloud infrastructure to our device interfaces. Just as we require clean and safe water to transit the physical plumbing into our homes, we need our applications to remain secure and high-quality as they transit cloud services.

    The IaaS/PaaS Shared Responsibility Model

    The best way to think about security in this cloud-native world is by using a shared responsibility model, with IaaS customers only responsible for certain elements of the security of an application that lies on top of the infrastructure. 

    In the traditional shared responsibility model, IaaS vendors are responsible for the configuration, management and security of infrastructure elements such as networking, databases and compute engines, in addition to physical security, redundancy and more. But each of their customers is responsible for the security and privacy of everything on top of that, from design to code to deployment.

    The Traditional IaaS/PaaS Shared Responsibility Model

    The Customer Side of the Shared Responsibility Model

    What’s missing from this model are software design, code risk and CI/CD security and integrity—and these areas are the most difficult, time-consuming and require a well-thought-out and comprehensive application security program.

    With new approaches to application security, organizations can better understand the risk of their cloud-native applications and automate a significant amount of risk remediation activities at the design or coding phases before deploying to the cloud. This requires taking a broad but contextual view of AppSec across the entire SDLC—and the modern nature of attacks requires a complete view of the SDLC to understand where the most impactful business risk lies.

    Organizations must evaluate the full picture of their risk—from design to code to cloud:

    1. Visibility—Understanding your risk starts with visibility into your security and compliance risks with a real-time inventory of assets, application and infrastructure code behavior, developer knowledge, third-party security alerts, sensitive data and business impact.
    2. Secure by Design—You need to make sure that security is addressed at the design stage—before any code has been written or committed.
    3. Change Management—Organizations need to focus on the risks that matter early in the development process and based on business impact. Material changes to the applications and infrastructure should be carefully evaluated while other changes can be approved more quickly or ignored, thereby accelerating product delivery.
    4. CI/CD Security and Integrity—As an ever-running, highly-trusted and sensitive process, CI/CD is often overlooked. Many attacks in the recent past exploited this Achilles’ heel of the development cycle by embedding attackers’ code within native code commits or other automatic CI/CD processes. Organizations should ensure CI/CD operations are secure with integrity and security checks in place.
    5. App & Infra Risks Together—To properly secure your applications, you must correlate the risks of your applications and infrastructure in one platform.
    6. Automation—Automation must also be employed to limit mistakes caused by human error, ensure consistency in enforcement of policies and increase the speed of the DevSecOps process. Organizations must carefully manage this process, because automation can also introduce a new category of issues, such as race conditions, untimely triggering, incomplete state validation for edge cases, etc.

    Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)

    The human element of risk has changed with IaaS and PaaS due to the power that cloud administrators now have. Instead of purchasing, configuring and deploying servers over a period of months, an admin can spin up a Kubernetes cluster or an S3 storage bucket, load customer data and expose it to the Internet with relevant identity and access management (IAM) policies in record time via infrastructure-as-code (IaC) using GitOps instead of ClickOps.

    The rise of IaC has enabled us to view, evaluate and respond to infrastructure changes in the same way we would any application code change. Organizations must apply the same governance rules and automation to review changes in infrastructure before they reach production, along with real-time analysis of cloud misconfiguration. 

    The main challenge is context! All IaC tools in the market today are looking at security misconfiguration as a single dimension (for example, an S3 bucket missing encryption; a cloud database missing SSL for incoming connections, etc.) and this creates a lot of noisy alerts. The risks of cloud infrastructure and the applications that run on top of it are inherently connected—it is harder to connect the dots and understand the true risk of changes than it is to accept alerts at face value!

    When securing your applications in the cloud, don’t rely on traditional tools and processes. Today’s technologies enable new approaches that help you understand and remediate risk in entirely new ways and make cloud-native applications more secure than ever.

  • CloudBees Acquires Neuralprints to Shift Compliance Left

    CloudBees Acquires Neuralprints to Shift Compliance Left

    At the online DevOps World 2021 conference today, CloudBees revealed it has acquired Neuralprints to provide the core technology for CloudBees Compliance, a real-time compliance and risk analysis platform that it will roll out in the first quarter of 2022.

    At the same time, CloudBees has enhanced the feature management capabilities of its namesake continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform to provide greater visibility into and control over feature flags that are now widely used to add new capabilities to applications.

    Prakash Sethuraman, chief information security officer (CISO) for CloudBees, said CloudBees Compliance will make it possible for DevOps teams to continuously enforce compliance policies as part of an effort to better secure their software supply chains. Those DevOps teams will be able to enforce compliance across code, binary artifacts, data, identity and infrastructure environments in a way that provides developers and IT operations teams with instant actionable feedback to enable issues to be addressed long before an application is deployed in a production environment.

    CloudBees Compliance is based on a mix of open source and proprietary technologies developed by Neuralprints and will be made available for on-premises IT environments as well as via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. The goal is to enable organizations to manage compliance as code as part of any effort to shift more responsibility for application security further left toward DevOps teams, said Sethuraman.

    CloudBees Compliance

    A survey of 500 C-level executives published today found nearly half (45%) admit that initiatives to secure their software supply chains are halfway or less-than-halfway complete. Nevertheless, 95% claimed their software supply chains are secure (95%), with more than half (55%) posting they are very secure.

    A full 93% said they are prepared to deal with an issue such as ransomware or a cyberattack on their supply chain. However, nearly two-thirds (64%) admitted they are not sure who they would turn to first if their supply chain was attacked; with 58% admitting that, if they experienced an attack, they have no idea what their company would do. An equal percentage (64%) said it would take more than four days to fix the problem if they did experience an issue.

    Almost all C-level executives (95%) said they think more about securing the supply chain now than they did just two years ago, and 92% said a security issue would impact their brand. A total of 83% said security issues cause their developers to drop everything to review code, with 82% noting that caused the organization to spend less time on innovation.

    On the plus side, 95% of executives said container images are checked for high or critical vulnerabilities, while an equal number said automation access keys are set to expire automatically. A total of 92% said their company only accepts commits signed with a developer GPG key, while 90% said dependencies to trusted registries are limited at their organization, while 89% said administrative access to CI/CD tools is restricted (89%).

    Of course, what C-level executives believe and what actually occurs inside an organization are not always one and the same. A series of high-profile software supply chain breaches resulted in a number of organizations reviewing their software supply chains. At the same time, the Biden administration has issued an executive order requiring all federal agencies to conduct similar reviews.

    One way or another, most organizations will soon find themselves embracing a wider range of DevSecOps best practices to ensure the integrity of software supply chains no matter how secure they may think their software development platforms are today.

  • Cloud Security Requires Shared Responsibility

    Cloud Security Requires Shared Responsibility

    The Growth of Public Cloud and the Need for Cloud Security

    Since 2006 when Amazon first introduced EC2 — the first public cloud service — cloud has become a major staple of enterprise information technology strategy. Both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and newer cloud services continue to grow robustly. Enter the need for cloud security.

    While providing undeniable benefits to users such as scalability, speed to market, and cost savings, public cloud offerings also created a new dilemma: Just who was responsible for security when the platform was no longer protected on the user’s  premises,  and was in some part controlled by a third-party vendor?

    Cloud security is an issue the industry has had to solve in order to achieve such impressive growth. Since 2014, security services have been a key focus area of cloud providers. This includes protection of the infrastructure itself and tenant boundaries, as well as advanced services protecting the data itself. Without security, no reasonable enterprise would use public cloud in production.

    AWS Approach To Shared Responsibility Model

    As a public cloud pioneer, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the first provider to introduce the term “shared responsibility model” and its components, starting to think about improving  cloud security to a level sufficient to protect enterprise production workloads.

    According to Amazon:

    ‍“Security and Compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer. This shared model can help relieve customer’s operational burden as AWS operates, manages and controls the components from the host operating system and virtualization layer down to the physical security of the facilities in which the service operates. The customer assumes responsibility and management of the guest operating system (including updates and security patches), other associated application software as well as the configuration of the AWS provided security group firewall.”

    In short, AWS secures the cloud’s physical infrastructure, compute, and network systems  from outside physical access and from digital access and insider threats.  The customer’s responsibility is to protect everything they run in the cloud.

    What Needs To Be Secured in a Cloud Deployment?

    The importance of security in the context of public cloud has led to formation of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). CSA has their own interpretation of the shared responsibility model.

    From the CSA’s perspective, the following are the categories of cloud systems that need to be secured:

    Information and Data – Data are the crown jewels of any digital business. From the addresses of paying customers to sensitive financial records and employees’ information ,  protecting data is critical to the success of any online business. Further, many compliance regulations, especially the recent focus on GDPR and CCPA, exert additional pressure to protect personally identifiable information.

    ‍Application Logic, APIs, and Code – The data are interpreted and processed by the application logic and application programming interfaces, or APIs. The code that implements applications can represent a core competitive advantage for the enterprise, but the logic itself and protection of the APIs is extremely important for securing  both the business and its data.

    ‍Users, Authentication, and Access Control – Users — who are both owners of the data and the source of revenue for the online business — , also need protection. From account takeover to identity theft, malicious actors can harm the users. The owner of the service where such attacks take place  is ultimately responsible for providing security.

    ‍Platform and Resource Configuration – This is the only major component of the cloud that is protected by the cloud provider itself. Protection is typically extended to the physical premises, computing resources, including cooling and physical maintenance requirements, network resources, virtualization systems and hypervisors, resource management systems, storage systems and so on.

    As Platforms Evolve, Does Shared Responsibility Change as Well?

    Newer cloud services go beyond providing just infrastructure-as-a-service and may influence how we think about shared responsibility.

    For example, some of the more interesting platform offerings include serverless compute services, a cloud development model that allows developers to build and manage applications without having to worry about server management. These offerings include  AWS Lambda, AI-as-a-service, (such as Google Cloud AI), and hosted blogs like Medium.

    If the application uses one of these advanced services, it changes how the shared responsibility model is applied because the provider is not just responsible for the host, but also for the security of the platform itself.

    While this helps us sort out security responsibilities, we must still consider security of information and data (think hosted WordPress blog); security of intellectual property and code (such as the case with serverless);  and security of the API and application logic (as might be the case with a hosted Kubernetes infrastructure, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service or Azure Kubernetes Service). All these data, application logic and code elements should still be secured by the cloud user or enterprise according to the shared responsibility model.

    There are a couple of additional important security considerations for newer platforms. Watch out for cloud lock-in. While running a guest Linux OS makes it extremely easy to migrate  workloads back on premises or to a different cloud, running the logic on a hosted platform makes the migration more difficult: the logic becomes dependent on the provider APIs. Secondly, data flows and compliance becomes a touch more difficult because best practices are not as well established for newer platforms.

    How Traceable Can Help with Cloud Security

    Traceable Defense AI provides application protection that helps fill in the customer’s share of the shared responsibility, especially as data flows, application logic, and APIs are concerned.

    Data flows – Traceable observes the data flows throughout the application running on the platform and identifies sensitive data for compliance purposes.

    API security in pre-production and production – Traceable maps out the application flows, protects applications and APIs from run-time threats, assesses API risks and helps with threat analysis and compensating controls.

    User-centric view – Traceable identifies suspicious activities and anomalies. When suspicious activity is detected on a previously well-behaved account, it’s an indicator of an account compromise. Combined with a rate-limiting functionality, this helps protect legitimate users.

    Traceable is a born-in-the-cloud company that prides itself on helping enterprises adopt cloud-native architectures in production. Understanding the shared responsibility model, selecting the cloud provider that holds up their end of the bargain, and using the right cloud security tools to fulfill the enterprise share of security responsibility is what will make the cloud truly secure.

    To learn more about Traceable you can visit us at https://traceable.ai or view a recorded demo.

  • Open Your Ears and Get Ready to Listen: Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes

    Open Your Ears and Get Ready to Listen: Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes

    If you think all the way back to primary and secondary school, you may remember hearing something like, “open your ears while your teacher is talking to you.” It’s true that someone tuned in to listening learns more than someone who doesn’t, but opening your ears is a lot more important than that. Open ears have the ability to open minds. And with the tech industry constantly changing it’s more important than ever to keep your ears—and your mind—open to change.

    With Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes approaching, attendees have the perfect chance to open their ears and listen to the best of the best in the tech industry. Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes is a two day virtual summit boasting over 50 speakers and sessions led by industry thought leaders and doers in the cloud-native space. Attendees will walk away with a better understanding of cloud native, its impact on the IT landscape and a lot more after listening to the key practices and methodologies of these tech titans.

    While there are a myriad of talented speakers at Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes, there are two very special keynote speakers you’ll want to pay extra attention and listen extra closely to. Hosting keynote sessions Aug. 4 and 5, Tara Hernandez and Caroline Wong are prepared to talk about technology shifting and the future of cloud-native security. With loads of experience and sage advice, Tara and Caroline are without a doubt the top two tech experts you won’t want to miss.

    If you’re unfamiliar with Tara Hernandez, she’s a senior engineering manager at Google Cloud Platform, Associate Board member of Women Who Code and the host of the 12 episode podcast series, ‘Women Who Code’. A specialist in software engineering infrastructure and early backer of the Continuous Integration revolution, Tara has done everything from developing developer tools such as Tinderbox and Bugzilla, working at Pixar Animation studios to reinvent development infrastructure to handle the challenges of writing software in a film production environment, and helping create cloud developer platforms at Google. Beyond being a wizard in her field, Tara is equally impressive in her drive to share useful things about engineering management. 

    No-one’s journey goes without its challenges. But for Tara, “One issue [she] has faced in her rise to success is a case of imposter syndrome. While she has always had the skills to overcome any challenges that came her way, it took a lot of work for her to develop mental self defenses, and tame the anxiety that came when she was presented with a project […] Getting involved with [Women Who Code] has made her aware of the need for advocacy at a grassroots level, and she’s become more confident brainstorming with peers and management teams about increasing diversity in her own work place. At the same time it’s helped her find the confidence to attend more conferences, and even start giving talks.” A supporter, advocate, mentor, and “shining example of someone who has overcome doubt to achieve success,” Tara is the ultimate speaker to inspire change and innovation, especially in creators. 

    Check out Tara’s podcast ‘Women Who Code’ and listen to her talk about the current state of DevOps here to learn more before her talk, ‘Those Little Tectonic Shifts,’ Wednesday Aug. 4 at 12:45 p.m. EDT. 

    Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes is also incredibly proud to host Caroline Wong, Chief Strategy Officer of COBALT. Caroline is also an author, teaches cybersecurity courses on LinkedIn Learning, and similar to her fellow keynote speaker, hosts the ‘Humans of InfoSec’ podcast. With a background in communications and cybersecurity, Caroline holds deep-rooted expertise every attendee will want access to. 

    As Caroline says, “Cloud native is here; it is scaling, and it is not going anywhere. The more we can see the reality and necessity of what security must become, the better we will all be in the long run.” In her talk, ‘The Future of Cloud Native Security,’ Thursday Aug. 5 at 11 a.m. EDT, Caroline will share her observations on how companies must change the way they build security into their cloud-native projects, forecast what’s next for cloud-native security, and how organizations must double down on people and process innovation to overcome the misconceptions, education gaps and common mistakes we see when it comes to the cloud.

    Be sure to check out Caroline’s podcast ‘Humans of InfoSec’ here before joining her keynote session next week.

    It’s always important to listen. But when listening means driving ideas forward, opening your ears can be the most beneficial tool to be better than we were yesterday.

    So open your ears, get ready to listen and join us Aug. 4 and 5 at 9 a.m. ET for a much needed active listening experience! Register today.

  • Mark Your Calendars and Meet the Best in Tech at Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes

    Mark Your Calendars and Meet the Best in Tech at Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes

    After over a year of dreaded isolation, many of us are ready to return to the networking and social atmosphere of pre-COVID life. While physical proximity continues to be a struggle, virtual proximity through events like virtual summits and teleconference meetings, is getting increasingly more helpful amidst the transition.

    Here are the top 10 reasons why Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes is a must-attend event:

    1. Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes is a continuation of the virtual social interaction we’ve seen throughout the last year but offers attendees more than just a chance to talk with session leaders and speakers. 
    2. Sessions will be geared toward practitioners, managers and C-level executives, and led by industry thought leaders and doers in the cloud-native space, allowing attendees an opportunity to meet and network with experts in the cloud-native field. 
    3. At the end of this two day virtual summit, attendees will walk away with a better understanding of cloud native and its impact on the IT landscape.
    4. Cloud-Native Days is hardly short of talent with over 50 speakers holding featured, insight and spotlight sessions. 
    5. Attendees will have networking access to a variety of speakers through keynote sessions at Cloud-Native Days, but catching keynote speakers Tracy Miranda and Rosalind Radcliffe’s sessions will certainly be a highlight of the virtual summit. 
    6. Not only will attendees be able to network with speakers, by means of networking, attendees will have the opportunity to forge collaboration. Keynote speaker Tracy Miranda has some valuable words to share regarding projects born from collaboration. She says, “We had this idea that Continuous Delivery is bigger than just one project, and we should be working together to make things inter-operable and better for everybody. Then as we went around talking to people for that idea— when it resonated with other people— they really became fans, and they would be like, “How can we help? What can we do? This is how we build up on it.” So find that core set of folks who will be enthusiastic, and will get you through the honeymoon period.” 
    7. Learn from the best of the best in the cloud-native space. With cloud-native technologies becoming an integral part of IT environments, it’s incredibly valuable to learn from industry specialists changing the IT world as we know it. 
    8. Listen to the best of the best at Cloud-Native Days. It’s always important to listen. But when listening means driving ideas forward, opening your ears can be the most beneficial tool to be better than we were yesterday. 
    9. Get real-world insight into topics like: trends and best practices in the cloud-native space, addressing Kubernetes complexities, tackling cloud-native security from the onset, etc.
    10. Have fun while learning new things! Who says networking and learning can’t be fun? With so many exciting people, sessions and topics, attendees have a lot to look forward to at Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes.

    Networking isn’t just about linking on LinkedIn anymore. Collaboration doesn’t come from a request, it comes from interaction, engagement and communication. Find all three and start collaborating at Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes, Aug. 4 and 5 at 9 a.m. (ET). 

    Now mark your calendars and meet the best of the best in tech! Register today.

  • Learning from Loris Degioanni: Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes Virtual Summit

    Learning from Loris Degioanni: Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes Virtual Summit

    Keeping up with information can be challenging. With all these changes, you’re probably left wondering, “who can guide me through all this information?” Fortunately, Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes is focused on giving attendees the tools they need to become proficient in cloud-native technologies. At the virtual summit, attendees can tune into our expert-led featured sessions and learn how to leverage cloud native technologies to move faster and more securely.

    Cloud-native technologies are quickly becoming an integral part of IT environments as organizations continuously accelerate their development efforts to meet business demands. Because of this, it’s incredibly valuable to learn from industry specialists changing the IT world as we know it. And who better to learn from than the industry thought leaders and doers in the cloud-native space? Through sessions touching on topics like security and observability, our featured tech titans will give you a better understanding of cloud native and its impact on the IT landscape.

    Today, the CI/CD pipeline is mainly built on open source tools – Kubernetes, Jenkins, GitLab, etc. Security has traditionally been closed, but it’s now clear the pace of innovation cannot be constrained by proprietary development models. Keynote speaker Loris Degioanni, CTO and founder of Sysdig, will discuss key practices needed for a secure cloud and container environment, including: what is required to increase security, visibility and simplicity in the cloud, lessons learned from major attacks like Kaseya and SolarWinds, ways to leverage Secure DevOps to not only ‘shift left,’ but also ‘roll right’ for detection and response, and how open source is the key ingredient to see all your signals in a constantly changing landscape.

    In his article, “Open Source is Taking Over Security,” published last year on The New Stack, Loris Degioanni elaborates on this idea that open source is essential to maintaining high security, stating, “I argue that, despite having lower penetration of open source, security is the industry that benefits the most from an open source approach. I also argue that open source will gradually take over and become the standard way to do security.” To understand this further, Loris breaks it up into a few key questions: Why is open source the best way to do security? and, Will open source become the standard way to do security?

    Let’s start with the most important question: Why is open source the best way to do security? Loris is adamant that open source is the key ingredient to security because of one thing – speed of innovation. Loris points out that the rise of widely adopted and open computing platforms like Kubernetes have had a big impact on how distributed, coordinated ecosystems can beat out a ‘behind closed doors’ single vendor 100% of the time. Loris writes, “On one hand, Kubernetes and cloud native have such a fast innovation pace that it’s hard for a vendor to keep up by itself. On the other hand, thanks to Kubernetes, for the first time we have a completely open platform to run our applications, where security can be natively integrated rather than being bolted on top.” 

    Open source also increases the speed of innovation because it empowers end users to work with vendors. Any user, regardless of size and level of sophistication, Loris says, can provide feedback in a tight loop and they can also contribute. So why is this relevant to security? As Loris explains, “The intrinsically fragmented nature of vulnerabilities and threats makes this bazaar-oriented approach to contributing very effective.”

    This brings us to Loris’s second question: will open source become the standard way to do security? Not only does Loris say yes, open source will become the standard way to do security, but in fact there is no escaping this. Using a metaphor of bad guys vs. good guys to describe cybersecurity battles, Loris says, “the army of the bad guys is big, smart, and aggressive. And the deck is stacked in their favor.” 

    So how do the good guys win in this scenario? Loris says the best chance at this is, “working together, as a team, leveraging each other’s strength, making sure that no energy is wasted.” Rather than having competing standards upheld by a variety of vendors, Loris is adamant that “a much better approach consists of leveraging a common set of standards that are deeply integrated in the platform, owned by the community, driven by consensus, on top of which all of the players can confidently innovate.”

    Much like Loris’s approach to open source, innovation and security are also valuable key practices at Cloud-Native Days with Kubernetes. Life moves fast. Innovation cannot afford to be slowed down, especially now. So begin your cloud-native information journey by tuning into our expert-led sessions, gathering your questions and learning from our talented speakers August 4 and 5 at 9 a.m. ET.

  • Fugue Aims to Simplify Securing Infrastructure-as-Code

    Fugue Aims to Simplify Securing Infrastructure-as-Code

    Fugue today unveiled a 1.0 release for Regula, an open source policy engine for infrastructure-as-code (IaC) security that comes with prebuilt libraries for implementing hundreds of policies that validate configurations on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud services.

    Regula is based on the Open Policy Agent (OPA) software being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is compatible with both Terraform and AWS CloudFormation tools for configuring cloud infrastructure.

    Developers can also build custom rules on top of OPA using libraries that Fugue created for the Rego programing language that is part of the OPA specification. Regula supports output formats such as JUnit, Test Anything Protocol (TAP) and JSON to make it easier to integrate Regula with other tools and frameworks that make up a DevOps workflow. Input formats supported include Terraform HCL, Terraform plan JSON, AWS CloudFormation and Serverless Application Model templates.

    Regula also provides out-of-the-box support for the CIS Foundations Benchmarks in addition to other policies defined by Fugue, such as dangerously permissive identity access management (IAM) policies, Lambda function policies allowing global access, volumes with encryption disabled and untagged cloud resources.

    It is deployed as a pre-packaged binary that includes a command line interface (CLI) through which Regula can be incorporated within a DevOps workflow and can be installed using tools such as Homebrew or deployed as a Docker image.

    Fugue CEO Josh Stella said Regula provides DevOps teams with an extensive library of rules that check for common security and compliance violations as well as advanced multi-resource misconfigurations. That latter issue is especially challenging because developers typically don’t have much visibility into dependencies that can inadvertently provide cybercriminals with access to, for example, an S3 cloud storage bucket that otherwise appears to be configured properly. Regula will also identify any required resources that might be missing, as well, added Stella.

    Stella said Regula 1.0 provides a simpler approach to securing cloud infrastructure. Cloud infrastructure is frequently misconfigured simply because a developer made a mistake. Unfortunately, cybercriminals have become especially adept at scanning cloud platforms for these misconfigurations, noted Stella.

    It’s not clear to what degree a backlash might be building against IaC in the wake of recent high-profile breaches of software supply chains. Organizations have embraced IaC tools to make developers more productive. However, each security incident involving a misconfiguration of cloud infrastructure resources makes it all too apparent that developers lack the expertise required to securely provision IT environments. Rather than creating a series of cybersecurity reviews that would reduce developer productivity, Stella said Fugue is making a case for a compliance-as-code approach that developers can readily understand and implement.

    One way or another, cloud infrastructure has to become more secure. Business leaders are growing weary of security incidents that, from their perspective, are caused by careless mistakes. Their first instinct is to empower cybersecurity teams to resolve those issues once and for all. The only issue that needs to be resolved now is just how cumbersome those security reviews need to be if developers are provided with the tooling required to secure cloud platforms themselves.

  • How to Move Fast Without Breaking Security

    How to Move Fast Without Breaking Security

    “Move fast and break things,” is a familiar motto. The phrase, attributed to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, helps to explain the company’s stellar growth over the past decade, driven by its product innovations. However, while it’s a useful philosophy for software development, moving faster than you’d planned is a risky approach in other areas, as organizations globally realized during the COVID-19 pandemic. While 2020 saw digital transformation program timelines advance by up to seven years, enterprises’ quick moves to the cloud also meant that some things got damaged along the way – including security.

    Our recent survey conducted with the Cloud Security Alliance showed that more than half of organizations are now running over 41% of their workloads in public clouds, compared to just one quarter in 2019, and this will increase further by the end of 2021. Enterprises are moving fast to the cloud, but they are also finding that things are getting broken during this process.

    The research showed 11% of organizations reported a cloud security incident in the past year, with the three most common causes being cloud provider issues (26%), security misconfigurations (22%) and attacks such as denial of service exploits (20%). In terms of the business impact of these disruptive cloud outages, 24% said it took up to three hours to restore operations, and for 26% it took over half a day.

    As a result, it’s no surprise that organizations have significant concerns about enforcing and managing security in the cloud. Their leading concerns were maintaining overall network security, a lack of cloud expertise, problems when migrating workloads to the cloud and insufficient staff to manage their expanded cloud environments. So, what are the root causes of these cloud security concerns and challenges, and how should enterprises address them?

    Confusion Over Cloud Control

    When asked about which aspects of security worried them most when running applications in public clouds, respondents overwhelmingly cited getting clear visibility of topologies and policies for the entire hybrid network estate, followed by the ability to detect risks and misconfigurations.

    A key reason for these concerns is that organizations are using a range of different controls to manage cloud security as part of their application orchestration; 52% use cloud-native tools and 50% reported using orchestration and configuration management tools such as Ansible, Chef and Puppet. However, nearly a third (29%) said they use manual processes to manage cloud security.

    In addition, there’s competition for overall control over cloud security: 35% of respondents said their security operations team managed cloud security, followed by the cloud team (18%) and IT operations (16%). Other teams, such as network operations, DevOps and application owners, all figured in, too. Having different teams using multiple different controls for security limits overall visibility across the hybrid cloud environment, and also adds significant complexity and management overhead to security processes. Any time you need to make a change, you need to duplicate the work across each of these different controls and teams. This results in security holes and the types of misconfiguration-based incidents and outages we mentioned earlier.

    How to Move Fast and Not Break Things

    So how can organizations address these security and management issues, and get consistent control over their cloud and on-premises environments, so they can take full advantage of cloud agility and scalability without compromising on security? Here are the four key steps:

    Get holistic visibility across your networks: a lack of visibility across cloud estates was the main security challenge for survey respondents. Organizations need to get holistic visibility across all of their different cloud accounts, including the security controls that are being used both in the cloud and to manage traffic to and from the cloud environments. This enables IT and security teams to quickly identify any potential security issues or risks that could lead to outages.

    One management console to rule them all: When using a mix of the cloud providers’ security controls as well as other controls, both in the cloud and on-premises, it’s a huge challenge for organizations to manage policies consistently. If all these diverse security controls are managed from a single console using a single set of commands and syntax, security policies can be applied consistently. This avoids duplication of effort and the error-prone manual processes that lead to misconfigurations and outages. It also provides a full audit trail of every change.

    Automate security and compliance processes for speed: Automation is essential to managing cloud environments efficiently while orchestrating changes across a complex array of security controls. It brings speed and accuracy to managing security changes across cloud environments. It also accelerates audit preparation and helps ensure continuous compliance. Automation also helps organizations overcome skills gaps and staffing limitations, which were cited as a challenge by over three-quarters of our survey respondents.

    Accelerate incident response, anywhere: Our survey also showed organizations are concerned about overall network security in the cloud. Security management solutions that integrate with SIEM or SOAR tools can help to address these concerns by accelerating incident response. As soon as a threat is detected by the SIEM or SOAR product, the management solution can identify all the applications and servers that the threat could impact. The solution can then mitigate the threat’s risk by automatically isolating any affected servers or devices from the network – whether in the cloud or on-premises – preventing lateral movement.

    With a network security automation solution handling these steps, organizations can get holistic, single-console security management across all of their public cloud accounts, as well as their private cloud and on-premises deployments. This helps them to solve the cloud complexity challenge and ensures faster, safer and more compliant cloud management – making it possible for organizations to move fast in response to changing business needs without breaking things.

  • Adapting Security with Menlo Security

    Adapting Security with Menlo Security

    Cloud data security is top of mind for CISOs. User data is moving across clouds, platforms and applications, and if we don’t shift to a data-centric approach, we won’t be able to protect that data.

    Jack Miller, head of professional services at Menlo Security and former CISO of over 16 years, addresses the balance of data, security and end-user convenience. Locating security close to users, close to data, and both are essential strategies for adapting security to the expanding presence of data.

    The video is immediately below, followed by the transcript of the conversation. Enjoy!

    Transcript

    Mitch Ashley: Well, I have the great pleasure of being joined by Jack Miller. Jack is Had of Professional Services, and also a former CISO at a different company, and he’s with Menlo Security. Jack, great to be joined by you today.

    Jack Miller: Thanks, Mitch, it’s great to be here. Yeah, before joining Menlo, I spent most of my career on the other side of the table as a practitioner. I was actually CISO at four different multi-billion dollar organizations over a span of 16 years. Been in the trenches for a long time, fought a lot of the battles—won some, lost a lot, and here I am today.

    Ashley: Such is the career in security, right?

    Miller: Yes, it is.

    Ashley: [Laughter] No doubt, no doubt. It’s a great pleasure to be talking with you. So, there’s a lot of things, of course, we could talk about, Menlo’s a great company, got some fantastic offerings. 

    What I’d like to really spend some time on is data. You know, we think about—I like to say there’s three reasons any application development team outside of IT is gonna come to IT. Security is one, and access to data and integration with systems.

    Miller: Mm-hmm.

    Ashley: So, let’s talk about data in the cloud, or what are some things we should consider maybe that we didn’t have to worry about in terms of securing data, but also not getting in the way with security for end user usability in the cloud.

    Miller: Yeah. I mean, look, I think the last point you touched on I wanna kinda drill into a little bit, because I think it’s so significant, right? That, you know, no matter how vested in security an organization is, right, how high they prioritize it at the very top, how much money they’re willing to spend, right? At the end of the day, it comes down to a battle between security and potential impact to your users and your business operations and business processes, right? 

    And when you think about it, I mean, companies and organizations don’t exist to be secure, right? They exist to make money, they exist to provide a needed service, right? So, at the end of the day, that’s what’s really most important. And so, you know, as the user data starts to move everywhere and it becomes in different places and now, we have the users moving everywhere. 

    So, we went from a really nice little model in the past where we had our users and our data in the same place most of the time, and now we’re in a model where our users are everywhere and our data is everywhere. And if we don’t shift our approach from a data center approach that we used to have to a data-centric approach, then there’s no way that we’re gonna be able to properly protect the data and do it in a way that’s not gonna be extremely, a difficult situation for the users to access the data, right? We need to make it fast and streamlined and accessible and once there’s a hiccup in their way, they complain and then we have to start turning our controls off, right?

    So, it’s a fine dance that we have to walk, and unfortunately, the legacy tools that we have and fitting into that data-centric approach just don’t really seem to work well in this new model.

    Ashley: That’s always the struggle with security is the convenience factor. Don’t get in the way of my job, but make sure that it’s secure. Don’t get me in trouble for having a breach or something happening.

    So, what are some approaches? Why do we have to think about this where we really can secure the data, wherever it is, and we’re creating more and more of it all the time, right? It’s a huge asset, but growing faster and faster. How do we do that where we can provide end users a level of convenience and security?

    Miller: Yeah, I mean, fortunately, today, we have the cloud, and for all the, as a security professional, for all the heartache that the cloud’s brought me over the years and all the challenges that it does introduce, it dos create this new opportunity now where I can, instead of having to have physical controls located somewhere, I can have virtual controls that are logically located all over the world, right? So, now, I can make sure those controls are close to the users or close to the data or close to both, whatever happens to make sense for any given business us case that we’re dealing with.

    Ashley: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, too. And also, I don’t know if automation is the right word, but the manual processes we’ve had in the past of providing access control, whether it be for applications or end users, it’s not realistic with how far and wide we’ve spread data and where it’s all located.

    Miller: Yeah, and everything’s so dynamic that even if we could get our hands around it today, by tomorrow, we’re gonna be playing catch up again, right? You know, the cloud has made it really easy for things like shadow IT to flourish, right? So, now, business units can go out and they can add new apps.

    So, we spent years in the enterprise putting in robust two-factor authentication solutions to protect our data. Now, suddenly, even if we go out and we do an analysis and we find all of our SaaS apps today and we protect them, what happens tomorrow when another business unit just happens to go out and start using a new SaaS app and they don’t tell you about it?

    So, it is a struggle, right? But like I said, there’s a silver lining to it in that the same thing that’s making it difficult for us does give us an advantage to be a little bit more ubiquitous, I think, maybe would be a good word and where and how we can apply security.

    Ashley: Mm-hmm. How do you think—and I know, you know, Menlo Security, obviously, being a security product company, but if you thought more generally, more broadly, has the market kept up with the uses and the needs of securing data in the cloud in particular, or we still have a pretty big gap to meet?

    Miller: So, I think there’s kinda two parts to that, right? I think from a capabilities perspective, I think that we’re closing the gap, and I think significantly more capabilities exist today than existed a couple years ago to be able to do that, and we’re making, I think, huge strides and great progress there.

    From an adoption perspective of getting these new capabilities and technologies out there and adopted with companies, right, that’s where we have the gap today. It’s always hard to get people to embrace new technologies and accept new technologies. And we’ve been talking about digital transformation for years and years, and it’s been very, very slow, the transition. And a lot of what we were seeing pre-COVID was being done to really save costs associated with remote locations, right, and eliminate those expensive MPLS circuits, eliminate redundant hardware and that type of stuff.

    You know, now you throw COVID on top where you have, suddenly, all these remote users being remote that were never remote before. So, now, looking at using the cloud and direct access and things like that to kinda solve that same problem but coming at it from a different direction, right?

    So, I think what I find interesting right now is that you hear a lot of people talk that this is the new normal, that we’ve proved that remote work can work and everybody’s gonna keep working remotely. And I don’t think this, today, is the new normal. I think that many companies are gonna have their employees come back to the office, for a number of reasons. But I think it’s gonna be very different than it was in the past.

    I think now, those areas in the organization that weren’t allowed to work from home a couple days a week are gonna be allowed to, that weren’t allowed to be able to travel and be able to work are gonna be allowed to.

    So, I think, you know, we kinda went from this everybody was in the office to now everybody’s at home, and I think now we’re gonna go back to, it’s almost a—who knows where everybody is, because they can do their work from wherever they wanna be.

    Ashley: You’ve sort of disproven whatever maybe-ness, maybe partial truths that, you know, “You can’t do this work remotely.” Well, we had to, we did.

    Miller: Right.

    Ashley: You know, what’s interesting, I think a lot of folks are thinking of a hybrid model, even people that have employees come back to the office is, “Yes, but maybe one or two days of work, they can very easily work remotely.” So, maybe that’s a closer step in the new normal that we’re, at least for the next couple of years gonna be experiencing, and who knows what happens after that? [Laughter] 

    Miller: Yeah, exactly, exactly. No, I think that’s where we’ll land. I think it makes perfect sense. I think, from a productivity perspective, that’s probably the best path forward. And I think it’s a path we can secure, as long as we’re adapting our approach, right, and we’re focusing on where the data is and securing the data as opposed to, again, not being focused in the traditional of where the office is or where the data center is.

    Ashley: Now, I’m curious your thoughts about this. I’m sure others are thinking about it, I just haven’t heard it a lot in the kinda open press or writings. With so many people mobile—of course, if you would’ve had time to plan it, you might have done some things differently, but thinking forward, if we are gonna live in this hybrid world, there’s probably information, some data that you want to, telemetry information you wanna track about how people are using your applications, where they’re using them from. Maybe the same, of course, applies to customers, if they’re more mobile, also, and yet more data that we’re generating and creating to target this, you know, broad ecosystem of data that we’re trying to collect. 

    And now, so much of that data is going back into how do we create a better experience for employees, how do we create a better experience, better services for our customers? So, all of that data is just as important as the credit card transaction that goes through—well, maybe that’s a little more important, but it’s all important that we can share that. So, the challenge, to me, seems like it’s getting bigger, not smaller.

    Miller: Yeah, I think it’s getting bigger, and I think we’re seeing—it’s been a while in progress, right, but I think we’re seeing a shift to more of the ransomware type of attacks. I think that it’s easier for the bad guys to quickly monetize their code with a ransomware attack with less chance of getting caught. And plus, one might argue that, you know, we talk about herd immunity for COVID and things like that. From a data privacy perspective, maybe we’ve reached herd immunity because so many people’s data’s already gotten stolen, right?

    So, at some point, there’s so much personal information out there that the data itself starts to become devalued, right? But hey, just like the battle we fight as security professionals that I can’t impact my users, I can’t impact my business operations, right, the bad guys are teeing in onto that, saying, “Look, that’s the most critical thing. If we can get in there and threaten to be able to impact those, then that’s a very viable path for them that they keep following right now.”

    Ashley: Yeah, it’s the whole business continuity, right? That’s what the ransom is about.

    Miller: Exactly, exactly.

    Ashley: Using your data for some other purposes, which can happen, also, as well. I’m really curious, just in your personal story as a former CISO, both organizations large corporations—what are some of the things that you were bringing into the role in Menlo Security that you’re hoping to help? I’m sure you have that list of things, “If I could’ve had a product that did this” or some of those problems that you’d love to help Menlo and the broader community solve.

    Miller: Yeah, I mean—so, look, let me kinda break that into two parts, right? Because there was a process that I went through when I decided to switch teams, if you will, right, and go from being a CISO to working the vendor space. And a lot of people ask me that question all the time, “Why did you leave being a CISO?” Right? That’s the role everyone wants to get to today—‘til they get there for a while, and then they wanna leave. But, you know, there are a number of—

    Ashley: ____ future that you wish for. [Laughter] 

    Miller: Exactly. But, you know, one of the big drivers was that, you know, what becomes very clear to me over the years was that most security companies, the vendors, they don’t have a lot of people there that have worked on the customer side before as the practitioners. And so, they don’t really understand the real world in which a company lives and operates, right?

    And so, you know, they don’t understand this balance between security and impacting your users. And what that means for you as a CISO, with how far back it can set you—I mean, a story. I’d implemented a large scanning, vulnerability scanning system, a huge vulnerability scanning system. And somebody did a scan one night and his server that was running an old, vulnerable version of WebSphere, and it knocked the server offline. You know, we didn’t get medals because we found these vulnerability before the bad guys did; instead, we had to stop all scanning and we had to redevelop our process so that we could ensure that if we ever took a system down scanning that it wouldn’t impact production. I’m not gonna say that we shouldn’t have done that in the first place and that’s not the right way to do it, but again, it just kinda highlights this one step forward, two steps back, right?

    Another example where you see this gap is, ask any security practitioner, right, about IDS/IPS, and they’ll say IDS. Ask any security vendor out there, and they’re all IPS, IPS, IPS, right? But the practitioners know I’m not gonna turn on prevention mode, because the collateral damage to me and my program and what I’m trying to accomplish is too great, right?

    So, that was really kind of one of the big things I wanted to bring here. And I feel like heading up professional services is an opportunity for me to do that, because that’s when we’re really working with the customers and we’re trying to get them deployed. And by having that empathy and showing the customers we understand what’s really important to you and we’re not just trying to force a level of security down you, we’re trying to help you be secure but be successful at the same time, I think there’s value there. And that was one of the big reasons why I ended up coming here and what I’m trying to do with Menlo.

    You know, the other part of the answer would be from a technology perspective. I think from a technology perspective—and I don’t wanna make this sound like a company pitch here, right, but isolation can provide such a level of value that really, at the end of the day, nothing else can. And I think I’ve always been a big fan of isolation, going back to the very beginning when there were some companies that maybe tried to bite off too much and isolate too many things and that didn’t really work well, right? So, by narrowing down the surface and focusing on what really matters, which is web traffic, isolation can, for whatever connections you can isolate, you can virtually remove your risk, which is unheard of in the security field. 

    But, you know, it’s hard, it’s not easy. There’s a hurdle to get there during deployment, and if we’re not understanding those challenges for the customers, then, you know, as a vendor, we can start pushing them too hard and we can push them into trouble without intentionally wanting to do that.

    Ashley: Yeah, your experience, you and I have that shared experience, because I’ve been both on the practitioner and the CTO profit company side of it as well. It seems like one of the things that I would guess you would bring to this is, you know what it’s like to try to use products maybe similar, maybe the same as what you’re working with, with Menlo. And you’re immediately gonna have a very good feel for what’s gonna work well for the customer, what’s gonna work and what’s not, because you can very quickly assess where they are and what they’re going through, maybe some similar things, maybe different, but you’ve been in very similar shoes. 

    So, you can help bring something to the table to them that is much more compatible. You know the balance of security versus user experiences versus available versus available versus whatever, you know, reporting to the board—all that stuff, all those issues. And you can’t teach that to someone, so that’s a unique skill—unique value, I should say, that you bring. 

    Miller: Yeah, well, and, you know, given the options, right? So, interacting with someone like you and being able to—you know, again, a lot of companies want to kinda sugarcoat things. And, you know, as a CTO, right, I’m sure you would agree any day of the week, you’d rather have someone tell it to you straight so you can properly prepare than have someone kinda just make things sound like they’re easier than they are, right? And—

    Ashley: The worst problem is the one you don’t know about.

    Miller: Right. And so, you know, being straightforward with people and being—you know, oversharing the information and giving them options, right? I mean, at the end of the day, we’re the experts in our technology. So, it wouldn’t make sense for us to ask you, “Well, how do you want this done?” but for us to be able to come to you and say, “Look, you know, here’s a few different options and here’s the pros and cons, right? We don’t totally know all the intricacies of your unique situation, but you know, maybe it kinda fits in with one of these, and what do you think makes sense for you to proceed forward?”

    Ashley: Can you tell us a little bit about some of the professional services that you do offer through Menlo?

    Miller: Well, I mean, largely, it’s deployment services, right? So, we have a deployment service process we call our QuickStart Deployment service. You know, one of the main tenets is really, we gotta help customers be successful, and a lot of customers, they get a little bit too excited, they try to run before they can walk. 

    And so, by putting together, really, a defined process that slowly walks you through it allows you to get your users onboarded, start getting some level of value and security from it so that when you start moving into the harder areas, where you might start impacting some people, you’ve got some good ammunition of value to be able to offset the conversation. Whereas, you know, a lot of customers just wanna run right out the gate and turn everything on full bore. And some of them won’t even do that and start with doing it with their executives, right? So, a lot of—[Laughter] I know how crazy that sounds.

    Ashley: Good luck with that. [Laughter] 

    Miller: Right, so, a lot of what it’s doing is trying to save the customers from themselves, right? They get excited, they see what it can do for them, pull the back into reality, let them know—look, here’s the pitfalls, here’s one you’re not gonna be able to avoid, but here’s how we can minimize it, right, the time to resolution, and here’s others that maybe you can avoid if we take some proper steps up front.

    Ashley: Good. I’m sure it’ll be very valuable to Menlo’s customers. And folks can find out more about professional services on MenloSecurity.com, I assume, correct?

    Miller: Yep, definitely.

    Ashley: Great. Well, it’s been a pleasure talking with you, Jack. I wish you the best, and I’m sure it’ll be a lot of fun working with customers in your role there at Menlo, so thanks for joining me today.

    Miller: Well, thank you very much, Mitch, I enjoyed it a lot.

    Ashley: You bet.

  • Tiering Cold Data to the Cloud Without Tears

    Tiering Cold Data to the Cloud Without Tears

    The cloud provides inexpensive storage. But like everything else in the cloud, there are hidden costs. Cloud storage providers (CSPs) charge to put data into and retrieve data from the cloud. They charge for the API calls and they generally charge an egress cost when the data is extracted from the CSP. So, to keep enterprise storage costs low, infrequently accessed data such as snapshots, logs, backups and cold data are best suited for tiering to the cloud.

    By tiering data, on-premises storage arrays need to only keep hot data and the most recent logs and snapshots. Typically, 60% to 80% of enterprise data has not been accessed in over a year. By tiering the cold data as well as older log files and snapshots, the capacity of the storage array, mirrored storage array (if mirroring/replication is being used) and backup storage is reduced dramatically. This is why tiering cold data can reduce overall storage costs by as much as 70%.

    The many advantages of this approach include:

    • Lower acquisition cost. Flash storage, used for fast access to hot data, is expensive. By tiering off infrequently used data, you can purchase a much smaller amount of flash storage, thereby reducing acquisition costs.
    • Lower backup and mirroring costs. By continuously tiering cold data, you can reduce your footprint, license costs and storage costs for backups and replication if the cold data is placed in robust storage (such as that provided by the major CSPs).
    • Improve performance and lower capacity of your storage array. By running storage at a lower capacity and by moving access to cold data to another storage device or service, you can increase the performance of your storage array and get by with a smaller storage array.
    • Enable processing of cold data without burdening the storage array. Processing and feeding your cold data into your AI/ML/BI engines is critical to staying competitive. With cold data in the cloud, you’re also reducing the load on your storage array, thereby extending its life.

    Know First, Then Tier

    A key challenge of cloud tiering is determining what data to tier. End users should not have to decide which data to archive or handle the management of shared files. This issue may result in IT organizations keeping too much data in expensive, hot storage. One way around this is to automate the process through business policies dictating when and how the process is applied. It’s also helpful to provide transparency of the data by keeping it in the existing namespace. Users can still find the data and access it as if it had never been tiered. Transparency enables IT to tier cold data continuously and systemically across all storage devices in the entire organization without requiring end user assistance.

    To help IT make the right decisions, analytics is needed to see just how much data you have, and how much has not been touched in three, six or 12 months. It will be even more compelling if IT can run what-if scenarios to determine how much they will save with cloud tiering. The last thing you want to do is tier data in the dark. Take time to understand your data assets before you invest in the effort.

    Here are other considerations, beyond analytics, when embarking on a cloud tiering initiative:

    • Transparent, continuous tiering. Tiering should be transparent to the user. If someone can still search for and access data that’s tiered without any change to the experience, IT can realistically tier data systemically across the enterprise. Without transparent tiering, it’s an onerous process to tier data because you will need user permissions.
    • Flexible tiering policies. You need the flexibility to exclude certain data sets, include others and select from a large range of data ages. Be aware that many tiering solutions provide an extremely limited set of policies.
    • Tiering across multi-vendor storage arrays. Most enterprises have storage arrays from multiple vendors, and each appliance will have different tiering solutions if any. This makes it difficult to roll out a consistent, global tiering policy across the organization. Look for a solution which can encompass all the storage devices you have today and might acquire tomorrow.
    • Fast access to tiered data. Accessing data from the cloud will incur a much higher latency than accessing data on the local storage array. But once the cold data has been retrieved you can cache it locally to eliminate future latency and reduce egress costs. If the data set is large, the tiering solution should stream it so that users can access it even while the rest of it is being recalled.
    • Native cloud access to tiered data. The tiering solution should allow access to the cold data directly using the cloud storages native access tools. For instance, if you tier cold data to AWS S3, you should be able to access the data directly from AWS using a standard S3 browser like CloudBerry. Unfortunately, most storage array tiering devices store the data in a proprietary format, meaning that you can only access it from the source storage array.

    Cloud tiering is a practical and easy step on the path to the cloud. When done right, it gets you into the cloud while reducing storage costs. There are new solutions available that make this approach seamless with no disruption to users and your existing data protection workflows. By running an analysis of data assets across your storage ecosystem, and setting up policies for migration of cold data, you can ensure that data is always living in the best places from both a cost and business perspective.