Sometimes the best way to accomplish something is to choose a path requiring the least friction, or amount of change.
Qualys customers now have that path available to them in bring vulnerability scanning into Google Cloud Platform. Qualys’ recent announcement means a one-click configuration change enables vulnerability scans in GCP with the results appearing in both Qualys Cloud Center and GCP Security Command Center.
Join me on this DevOps Chats to explore this announcement with Sumedh Thakar, Qualys President and Chief Product Officer. We discuss Qualys’ and Google’s collaboration and how this benefits DevOps teams.
Transcript
Mitch Ashley: Hi, everyone. This is Mitch Ashley with devopsy.kinsta.cloud and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat podcast. Today I’m joined by Sumedh Thakar who’s President and Chief Product Officer with Qualys. We’re talking about an important announcement that just happened with Qualys and with Google about security natively embedded within Google. Welcome to the podcast, Sumedh.
Sumedh Thakar: Hey, Mitch. Thank you for having me.
Ashley: Great to have you. Well, let’s start by just having you introduce yourself and, of course, as President and Chief Product Officer we can imagine what you might do at Qualys, but go ahead and tell us a little bit about what you do.
Thakar: Yes, I’m not sure you can imagine because I’ve been here for 16 years, so I’ve done a lot.
Ashley: Okay. [Laughs]
Thakar: Today, as President and Chief Product Officer, I’m responsible for product strategy and implementation of Qualys product and where we have come from where we were many years, mainly focused on just vulnerability assessment. So today I have the engineering product management support operations team as well as the sales team and that kind of gives a pretty unique perspective because of the engineering and the DevOps teams within Qualys. Also, part of the organization for me helps me to really get a very good understanding of today what are the needs for DevOps and what evolution we’re going through with the DevOps team internally within Qualys, and being a massive SaaS platform ourselves I think that that’s something that I’d really like to focus on when we develop security solutions for DevOps teams.
Ashley: Well, it does give you a very hands-on perspective, both _____ as well as living with DevOps in your own products internally. It’s great.
Thakar: Exactly.
Ashley: It’s good for you. Great role to have. Well, let’s dive into this announcement. So, security that’s natively embedded within Google – Google Cloud I think we’re talking about.
Thakar: Right.
Ashley: Tell us a little bit about what it is.
Thakar: Yeah, we’ve had a fantastic partnership with the Google team and, you know, I think as digital transformation, moving things into cloud container and DevOps have been really getting traction for us to _____ differently than what we have done in the past, which has always been after the fact, adding security solutions. So, today with DevOps and DevSecOps the opportunity to embed security upfront into the infrastructure in an automated way so that you can ensure that you’re not missing – you know, that’s always the biggest issue with security is, oh yeah, I did all of that, but then I missed that one thing because I didn’t know that existed.
So today, Google Cloud has a fantastic solution that really allows DevOps team, as they’re pushing code continuously into the cloud, to have the ability with this new Qualys integration to automatically have that capability of assessment of the security of that virtual machine embedded directly and done transparently so that the end user does not really have to go about installing agents and consoles and all of that. It’s done; completely embedded in the platform.
Ashley: Excellent. So interesting, and we’d love to dive into this some more, because you’re talking about not bolting things on after the fact. You know, this is the whole shift left idea within DevOps.
Thakar: Yes.
Ashley: So, I imagine with the Qualys cloud agent for Google that’s something that you’re embedding within the software platforms that developers test production environments you’re using.
Thakar: Yes.
Ashley: Is it that kind of a lifecycle?
Thakar: Yes, exactly. So, developers today use that solution to first of all ensure that in their – whether it’s Jenkins or whatever it is that they don’t even push solutions out to production that already have vulnerabilities, right? The unfortunate side effect of doing this bolting on after the fact is that the moment you spin up a new machine it already has so many vulnerabilities in the last two years, you spend all your time trying to patch them. So, this DevOps pipeline does give us the opportunity to ensure that first of all in your build process you already eliminate and patch your images so that you don’t go out with images that are already vulnerable, and _____ customers absolutely use the Qualys agent and scanning to really achieve that.
But then once it gets pushed out to product you also want to have a monitoring to ensure that somebody doesn’t go to an S3 bucket or to a Google storage unit to pull down a vulnerable version of some sort of a software in their virtual image and create new vulnerabilities, so you also need to have that monitoring. And so that native embedding ensures that once you have done your DevOps process and cleaned the image, as the image is being pushed into the production environment in the cloud, in Google cloud, it is going to have that monitoring capability already embedded transparently without having to do additional effort.
Ashley: Great. I imagine it’s not a heavy lift for developers to install this in the development test environment, right?
Thakar: Yeah, and that’s the beauty of it is everything is automated, right? So, once you write the scripting it’s not a process that requires you to run commands every time and do all of that. Once you push that into the CD process then it’s really transparent, because in this case the developers don’t even need to run any command to get the agent onboarded. It’s an option that they check in the Google security center and then every single image that spins up will have that sort of one-click integration and automatically embedded in there.
Ashley: Great. I imagine then you’re also tying back into integrating into the security consoles both within the Qualys environment and also within Google?
Thakar: Yes, absolutely. That’s a unique ability here, because you have multiple business units for organizations. Different teams have different accounts in Google and they are, of course, only looking at their own application or their own account. And so the second part of this announcement really is also the fact that those vulnerabilities and those issues that are detected are then pushed back into the security center from Google so that the individual owners of the accounts can see all of the vulnerabilities on all of the issues that they need to fix right there within their console and they can create playbooks and use the automation that is available to quickly fix those issues so that they don’t have to know go to another tool and go to another console and try to do all of that.
For the IT folks and the DevOps folks who are pushing these applications into the cloud, they just see their own individual view directly in Google, but then of course this information also is available in the Qualys console, which is a wider visibility into the overall risk posture because it will also include the security and vulnerability findings from other types of infrastructure that the customer also has, things like laptops and handheld devices and containers and other things as well. And so the security team will leverage the Qualys platform because then they get a holistic view of the entire outside vector. The individual team in Google will get their view within the Google console so that they can really focus on fixing what they need to fix.
Ashley: Really kind of empowers that idea of SecOps, right?
Thakar: Right.
Ashley: Better right upfront.
Thakar: Exactly.
Ashley: Now I imagine that the security engineers – you know, usually there’s some kind of a corporate security team maybe involved in operations, maybe not, but also would be super pleased about having this implemented earlier into the dev cycle and also that it’s pre-integrated already into the Qualys platform, Qualys monitoring as well as Google’s cloud monitoring.
Thakar: Right. And that’s really a very good point because that’s a big struggle for security teams, right, is that just getting – ensuring that the entire infrastructure is covered by the security solution is a challenge when you do it after the fact, because they may not even know that there’s a new instance that was pushed by the dev team overnight into the Google account, the security may not know. So, with this integration of course it ensures that no matter what gets pushed Qualys is always monitoring every single image that goes out. Now the security team is good for them because they don’t have to spend a lot of time as they have been doing so far trying to get the security solution implemented.
So instead of focusing on the findings of the security solution a lot of security teams just spend time trying to get that actually installed and making sure it’s up and running and it’s connecting and all of that. So, having the DevOps team actually do all of that work is fantastic because now the security team can only focus on what is important, which is your policy. So, they can be the one that says, “Well, this is a failure if you have a _____,” and they don’t have to worry about how the thing is installed or whatever it is. Qualys is then the third party that ensures that the policy that the security team has defined is actually tested and a pass or a fail is given to both sides of the house and then they each can go ahead and do what they need to do in terms of fixing and reporting those issues.
Ashley: Now, you described in the announcement sort of one-click integration. What does one-click mean? Can you visualize that for us, how that works?
Thakar: Yeah. So we say one-click because if you have ever deployed security solutions they are absolutely painful, you know, trying to get the multiple commands –
Ashley: Or like one month or one quarter. [Laughs]
Thakar: Yeah, it’s a thousand clicks and multiple consoles and whatever it is. So the one-click is really because when you go and look at that integration, once you kind of go in Google security center and define that Qualys account that you connect to, then after that it’s really just checking one box that says that include the Qualys agent in every single image and then you don’t have to do anything after that, like you don’t even have to run a separate command every time you initiate a new image because that is already taken care of in a very easy manner with the automation that is provided by Google.
Ashley: Wow. So it truly is a checkbox kind of process.
Thakar: Right.
Ashley: Just included.
Thakar: Exactly.
Ashley: Are there any other things that maybe you’re already doing or that are part of this announcement in terms of what you’re doing to monitor scan and report vulnerabilities in the Google cloud environment?
Thakar: Yeah. I mean we have a very strong partnership with them. We’re listed, of course, in the marketplace as well, and with this sort of integration it really provides sort of a security reference architecture where, you know, Google can now provide along with Qualys customers the ability to make it significantly easy by defining the architecture of how you want to secure your workload that you’re putting in Google and then have – not only define the right solutions that should be used but then also work with vendors like Qualys to get those directly implemented with a single click so you also remove the resistance at integration and really simply that overall process. And so that will enable existing Qualys customers as well as new customers who already are going through the digital transformation, they may have Qualys already on their on-prem infrastructure; now it makes it – it removes another hurdle for them to really move into Google cloud because they can get the same kind of reports and the same kind of analysis as they have been used to because their auditors are very comfortable and used to having the Qualys reports so now they can get the same reports and don’t have to go through an entire process to recertify another solution, so there’s a lot of these kind of benefits that go across the board, and just having that embedded I think really helps.
Ashley: Yeah. It certainly lowers the bar to entry –
Thakar: Right, right.
Ashley: – into the Google cloud if it’s already integrated into the Qualys and Google platforms. Let’s circle back to talking about what are some of the benefits to the DevOps teams getting the Qualys agent into their environment earlier? What kind of things do they learn in the dev cycle and the test cycle group normally they would’ve skipped and not found out till way later when they’re ready to go to production or in production?
Thakar: Yeah. So because the way the platform is structured with APIs, the biggest advantage, there is automation of – and that’s what DevOps is all about, right? How can I script? You know, you talk about infrastructure as a code. I talk about security as a code, right? Can you just code in to say – you know, like you do your infrastructure, can you say if vulnerability is greater than this than failed _____ or, you know, can you write that as a thing?
And with the way the Qualys platform is and being a cloud-based platform ourselves and with AP as available, that makes it extremely easy for the DevOps folks to really create directly these scripts that they can basically say, “In your pipeline I got a new image, bring that image up, Qualys agent gets already embedded, it does its analysis and the findings show back up in the console and now you can really code that thing with a human, never having to go in and verify and look at the scans or whatever it is, right?” The way the architecture of the Qualys platform and the agent is, is that agent is an extremely lightweight agent that is not focused on doing just vulnerability assessment.
It does inventory assessment. It does vulnerability, also configuration assessment. And so what happens is that single agent can be used to look at a larger picture of the security of the device and not just if the software is not updated, right? You can do everything from is unauthorized software being put on this build, is end-of-life software being put on this build, is there configuration that is incorrect even though you may have patch or all your vulnerabilities, and so on and so forth. With that sort of an integration, what happens is that once you have done that one task of getting that agent on the virtual machine you can now suddenly with just APIs do a lot more to get a broader view and make sure that that overall workload is heavily locked down, because now you really are ensuring that all the configurations are as per the golden images and all of the CIS benchmarks are followed and all the software is updated and unauthorized software is already eliminated from that whole thing. DevOps is all about how do I eliminate the manual work and how do I use automation and reduce the amount of work that I have to do, and that’s exactly what that architecture enables us to do.
Ashley: I think it’s an extremely good point; with all the automation, the increase in speed, the decrease in manual intervention or tasks that are being performed. It’s easy for something to slip in.
Thakar: Yeah.
Ashley: New opensource code we haven’t used before or something now has got a vulnerability that didn’t two hours ago and you’ll find out right away.
Thakar: And, you know, one of the things that we have seen is the DevOps push to go quickly into production and sort of was that initial thing of, “Oh, I want to bypass my operations team, I want to bypass my security team,” and the flipside of that is like now your code that goes directly to production and has an issue, that’s on you as a DevOps – like you cannot blame the security person because, you know, they are not really involved anymore. And so that also incentivizes the developers up front to ensure that they’re doing all the right things from a security perspective also so it’s not their microservice that goes out that has their name on it that gets compromised, right? Because then you can basically say, “I’ve coded everything, done everything on my side up front so that what I am pushing out to production using automation is not something that is already vulnerable.”
Ashley: Excellent. So, let’s talk about how do you get access to this with the release of this capability? Is it already native within Google cloud? You just connect to it and say, “Here – you know, I’m already a Qualys customer,” or do you have to go to Qualys to sign up for something or how do you get access to this?
Thakar: Yeah. So, we – and as Qualys we provide directly – if you go to Qualys.com there’s – you can sign up for a free trial if you’re not a Qualys customer and, you know, we’re a SaaS service so you immediately get credentials that you need to access the platform, but then it’s completely embedded in the Google cloud console, so when you got there and there’s the configuration settings you will be able to now pick Qualys as a vulnerability management capability that you would like to add and, you know, there’s a one-time configuration where you provide your Qualys agent information and from that point on, once you have that done, every single – you know, do that one-click checkbox, after that that embedding will happen automatically and Google cloud will be the one doing that for you. So within a few minutes you can be up and running with this integration and starting to see the results in a couple hours.
Ashley: Excellent. Is there any incremental cost for this or is it already included, just an added capability in the Qualys product?
Thakar: Yeah. So, it’s a cost that the license of vulnerability management that customers already have. They can basically just take that license or use that or they can come and purchase additional licenses to run additional infrastructure in Qualys, but it’s the same license that they would otherwise use that they can use – that they get from Qualys and they can use in Google Cloud as well.
Ashley: Yeah. Just the licenses they would need to manage a Google could environment anyway.
Thakar: Exactly.
Ashley: Okay. Excellent. Well, great. Fantastic news. Anything else we should know before we wrap up?
Thakar: No, I’m really – you know, as heading the product, I’m always curious to get feedback, and so I encourage as many of your listeners to go and sign up and, you know, send us feedback on how they feel it helps simplify, and if there’s opportunities for us to simplify the DevOps process even more with better integration we’ll be happy to hear that.
Ashley: Great. Well, let us know how it goes and we encourage our listeners, go check out Qualys. Qualys.com. And especially if you’re an existing customer, it sounds super easy to start to use this, and I know – I’ve been a Qualys customer and also worked with Qualys before as a partner and super easy to get set up and going, so I encourage folks to check that out. Well, thanks for joining us, Sumedh. Congratulations on the announcement.
Thakar: Thank you very much. Thanks, Mitch. Good talking to you.
Ashley: Nice to talk with you. I’d like to thank my guest, Sumedh Thakar, President and Chief Product Office of Qualys, and of course, thank you our listeners for joining us today. This is Mitch Ashley with devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Have a great day and be careful out there.
— Mitchell Ashley
