Lateral Security for the Private Cloud – Leveraging the Power of Seamless Integration

Because modern threats are distributed and multi-varied, protecting against them cannot be accomplished through a series of point security solutions.

Recently, there are discussions happening in the industry around the “platformization of security”. These are not new thoughts but are all essentially derived from how to offer a simpler solution to a complex problem. In my previous blog “Tackling the 5Cs of enterprise security with the advent of AI” , I had highlighted the preference for “consolidation” through a platform approach.

Since the security attack surface is ever broadening, customers prefer a holistic and integrated approach to solving it, versus a variety of point solutions each with independent bells and whistles. Integration in this context means seamless interworking between the different components, deep visibility across the components and providing customers with a secure plug-n-play experience that drives operational simplicity and ease of use. Fundamentally, his is the promise of the security platform.

Let’s consider this in the context of the private cloud, taking the industry-leading private cloud solution from VMware as an example. Enterprises choose private clouds because it gives them greater control, compliance, and, in many cases a significantly lower operating cost structure.

Customers adopting the Continue reading

Tackling the 5Cs of Enterprise Security with the Advent of AI – Spotlight on Cloud and Automation Efficiency

For the traditional enterprise, the last decade has been an ongoing saga in the journey to cloud. This either moving workloads into the public cloud or embracing a cloud-operating model within their private cloud and data center environments. Along the way multi-cloud and hybrid deployments have also become commonplace.

This trend gave birth to many companies that built solutions that were born in the cloud or were highly optimized for deployment there. Organizations big and small embraced the “cloud-first” and subsequently “mobile-first” mentality. While smaller organizations with no legacy infrastructure or applications were able to embrace cloud tenets from Day-1, for larger organizations, the journey has had many pit stops and perhaps several pit falls. A lot of this rolled under the digital transformation umbrella, as CIOs, CISOs and even CEOs became executive sponsors of such initiatives.

The shift from agility to efficiency

During the last 10-15 years, the move to cloud has largely been precipitated by the need for agility. The initial developer driven move to cloud, that had precipitated “shadow-IT”, has gradually paved way for dual-mode IT and now become mainstream as enterprise IT organizations proactively took ownership leading to a more pragmatic cloud operating model.

The Continue reading

Cybersecurity, Cloud and AI: Top-of-mind themes heading into 2024

Recently I had the opportunity to host a group of forward-thinking CISOs, CIOs and other executive decision makers drawn from several enterprise organizations in the United States. The goal was to frame perspectives on trends and priorities emerging within their respective organizations while co-relating to broader industry trends.  Specifically, the intent here was not to x-ray the requirements of any single organization, but rather to identify, detect and understand patterns that could, in turn guide priorities over the next few years, benefiting the broader community. The discussions unearthed a lot of commonality in terms of shared pain points and higher order goals, and I thank the leaders that participated in the exercise, as well as the talented members of my team that came together to create a successful forum for discussion.

This multi-part blog series will summarize prominent patterns and insights that emerged from these sessions, that would hopefully serve as guideposts for the next 12-24 months, mostly in the areas of security, cloud infrastructure and deployment models.

Over a few sessions, broadly we had the cohort dive engage along three axis –

1. The first was to really examine their top pain points. Issues, that if solved, would help Continue reading

Generative AI Meets Cybersecurity: Use Cases for Lateral Security and the SOC

With security, the battle between good and evil is always a swinging pendulum. Traditionally, the shrewdness of the attack has depended on the skill of the attacker and the sophistication of the arsenal. This is true on the protection side of the equation, too—over $200B in investments have been poured in year on year to strengthen cybersecurity and train personnel.

It is fair to say that Generative-AI has upended this paradigm on its head. Now, an unskilled hacker with low sophistication could leverage Gen-AI “crowdsourced” constructs to become significantly more destructive with relatively little to no investment and training. This explodes the threat surface significantly.

Consider a recent example that one of VMware’s security technologists shared leveraging generally available ChatGPT. When he requested ChatGPT to create an exploit code for a vulnerability, it resulted in an appropriate denial.

Note that the software can understand the malicious nature of the request and invokes its ethical underpinning to justify the denial.

But what if you slightly shift the question’s tonality, and frame it as seeking “knowledge” instead?

What was previously denied is now easily granted with just a few keystrokes, and the exploit code is dished up.

Admittedly, you Continue reading

VPC: The Secure Bridge Between Application and Infrastructure Teams

The Cloud operating model is all about simplicity—bringing the agility of public clouds together with the security and control that enterprises have traditionally placed importance on. The fundamental expectation is to deploy applications with “one-click”—or one-API call.

In embracing this model, application developers expect to move at warp speed but are often hampered by necessary guardrails imposed by the infrastructure and security teams. For the Modern Enterprise so beholden to rapid software development as part of their innovation lifecycle, this can be frustrating.

The challenge traditionally lies in the complexity of setting up and provisioning infrastructure and security. These problems are compounded in hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, and where multiple teams are involved. Network teams are responsible for configuring and making the network operational. Security teams then take over the definition and implementation of firewall and advanced security policies. This can be multi-layered. Likewise, the application load balancing teams are responsible for ensuring the application performance.

While well intentioned, these teams produce several tickets that can take days to weeks to resolve. As a result, a simple application can take weeks, if not months, months to be deployed.

Application owners and the lines of business owners, want true agility, with Continue reading