You Need Enhanced Security for a Successful Cloud Transformation
2643
Of your peers have already read this article.
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Twenty years ago, organizations discovered the magic of server virtualization. Among the many benefits of virtualization, it heralded the end of the need for one physical server per application and the beginning of managing software-defined infrastructure. It helped automate building and installing systems, and it helped lay foundations for today’s Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery mechanisms and DevOps practices. However, the adoption of virtualization was not always smooth and several hurdles stood in its path. Today’s organizations are facing similar obstacles in their journey to the cloud.
Organizations that wanted to virtualize their server environment two decades ago faced a significant challenge that was neither technical nor budgetary, but organizational, stretching across IT teams and beyond. The first team to be concerned about virtualization was the one in charge of installing the physical servers in the racks of the datacenter, managing the physical network connections and operating environmental controls, such as HVAC and power systems. These tasks were drastically reduced, if not outright eliminated.
The second team affected by this shift in technology was the one responsible for installing the operating system and running the post-install procedures. Their job almost completely disappeared as most virtual machines were automatically instantiated from templates.
As a result, successful adoption relied on the ability to smooth these organizational changes. Along the way, training the staff and making sure they acquire the new skills necessary to operate the virtualization infrastructure was critical. And usually, the affected teams eventually found that their new responsibilities were different but still essential to the organization, and perhaps even more appealing.
Virtualizations lessons for cloud transformation regulators
Discussions on virtualization didn’t end with these internal changes when organizations were operating in a regulated environment. They needed to engage closely with their regulators. Regulated organizations often considered the hypervisor solely as an additional layer of software with potential vulnerabilities.
This viewpoint raised risks (such as virtual machine escape) that didn’t exist with physical servers. Even if this is taken into account and the risks mitigated, it should have been considered in balance with all the benefits of machine virtualization, including security benefits such as asset identification, harmonization, and smoother patch management.
While the relevance and benefits of virtualization are now widely accepted, history has repeated itself as similar issues have arisen for organizations facing cloud migrations. When large cloud service providers (CSP) began supporting critical workloads for their customers, regulators increased their oversight over CSPs and issued guidance concerning cloud adoption. This happened in the European financial sector, with guidelines from the European Supervisory Authorities (European Banking Authority, European Securities and Market Authority and European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority,) and the coming Digital Operational Resilience Act regulation.
These regulations can help establish trust between providers and customers. As regulator decisions are vital for organizations, there is an opportunity now with cloud technology to balance the risks with the benefits and take into consideration all the ways CSPs can help organizations improve their overall security and compliance levels.
Cultural transformation can drive cloud transformation
Another similarity between cloud transformation and the journey to virtualization is the required internal transformation. When an organization decides to start its journey to the cloud, training its staff with the new technology and tools is a necessary step, but probably not the first nor the most arduous to make. A change of mindset is paramount to fully incorporate all the cloud benefits, in particular regarding security.
This new approach begins with a deep transformation at the organizational level. Organizations should avoid viewing the cloud as a datacenter because there’s so much more potential to cloud technology. This new approach and its accompanying organizational transformation is driven by two factors: The burdens that the CSP removes from the customer, and the new flexibility that software-defined infrastructure brings to the table.
The CSP directly manages several tasks and services, and their security, which means that they’re no longer a direct concern for the customer. These responsibilities include data center management, security-hardened hardware, default encryption for data at rest and data in transit, and resilient network management.
Since all the infrastructure used by the organization to manage its workloads is software defined, it brings much more flexibility to what can be done with it. Software-defined infrastructure can more easily enable security guardrails and continuous compliance that weren’t possible before.
While there’s a temptation to approach an organization’s cloud transformation as merely a “lift and shift” operation from on-premises infrastructure, the reality is that approach reduces the potential gains a cloud transformation can bring to an organization. Moving systems to the cloud accounts for a small portion of the potential impact, while updating the mindset can be truly transformational. Development, architecture and security processes need to be rebuilt; this inevitably requires a deeper transformation of the organization.
The next step is to transform the operations, to align them with the overall organization and the new defined processes, operationalize CI/CD and build DevOps practices. After that, the technological gap will be adjusted, moving the new tools and teaching teams how to best use them.
The important point here is the order of the transformation to manage: organization, operations and technologies (O-O-T) and not the other way round (T-O-O). Of course, these three steps should not be considered completely sequential, as technology plays an important role in the organization and the operations. However, it is essential to support the development of personnel and frameworks to take full advantage of the transformation opportunity, rather than primarily focusing on the tooling.
In addition, at Google Cloud, we believe in a shared fate that goes far beyond the usual shared responsibility model. We think it is part of our duty to help our customers to achieve their goals in their scope of responsibility. We prepare secure landing zones and guide the customers, we bring transparency to security controls and help them with cyber-insurance.
Our shared objective with our customers is to continuously improve security. Our Google Cybersecurity Action Team initiative helps us to be engaged alongside our customers, provide them with necessary guidance, support them in their security and compliance strategies, and assist their organizational and operational transformation in their cloud journey.
- Listen to a related podcast “How to Apply Lessons from Virtualization Transition to Make Cloud Transformation Better”
- Listen to “Preparing for Cloud Migrations from a CISO Perspective, Part 1”
- Read “The journey to the cloud mitigates enterprise risk”
- Also, review “Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all”
- Visit Google Cybersecurity Action Team website
3285
Of your peers have already watched this video.
4:43 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Beaconing Malware: How CISOs Can Catch it With Threat Analytics in Just a Few Clicks
Are you checking your network for beacon activity? If you aren’t you are risking your business’ reputation and customer data.
Beaconing is the practice of sending short and regular communications from an infected host to an attacker-controlled Command and Control server, compromising internal information.
These threats often go undetected but with Google’s Backstory you can store and continuously analyze petabytes of security telemetry. It ingests a large amount of telemetry data in just a few clicks, normalizes it, indexes it, correlates it with known threats, and makes it available for analysis.
This unmatched speed combined with UI responsiveness translates incident investigations and threat exploration into tasks that analysts can complete in seconds instead of hours.
Watch this four-minute video to find out how to focus on investigations to fight Malware Beaconing.
Redefining Network Security with Google Cloud’s Secure Web Proxy
1203
Of your peers have already read this article.
3:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Google Cloud provides multiple layers of security to help customers stay ahead of evolving threats and keep their cloud workloads safe. Today at our annual Security Summit, we are excited to announce the general availability of Secure Web Proxy, a new cloud-first network security offering that provides web egress traffic inspection, protection, and control. Secure Web Proxy (Cloud SWP) can help networking and security teams implement Zero Trust networking principles, discover malicious activity, and support forensic investigations
How Secure Web Proxy works
You configure workloads to use Secure Web Proxy as a gateway. Web requests can originate from virtual machine (VM) instances, containers, serverless environments, and workloads outside of Google Cloud connected by Cloud VPN or Cloud Interconnect. Policies and rules in Cloud SWP will be applied to traffic sent from these workloads to the internet.
Cloud SWP helps enable organizations to enforce granular access policies, limiting egress web traffic based on source, identities, destination, or request types. With Cloud SWP you can create policies with Google Cloud Identity Access Management (IAM) context using service accounts and secure tags to block egress. For example, you can set a policy to limit a service account to sending traffic to a specific outbound destination.
Secure Web Proxy offers a scalable TLS inspection service that lets you intercept TLS traffic, inspect the encrypted request, and enforce your policies. Cloud SWP integrates with Cloud Logging to record metrics and transaction logs for requests handled by the proxy.
Common use cases for Secure Web Proxy
Many organizations employ a proxy like Cloud SWP to programmatically restrict workload access to only trusted external web services.
You can also use Cloud SWP to monitor outbound access. The proxy identifies traffic that doesn’t conform to policy and logs it to Cloud Logging. This allows you to monitor internet usage, discover and disrupt threats on your network by spotting command and control traffic or anomalous data transfers. Logs can be also used in forensics to investigate security events and incidents involving egress web traffic.
Operational benefits
Secure Web Proxy is another example of how Google Cloud continues to deliver built-in, cloud-first security capabilities that offer operational efficiencies for our customers.
Cloud SWP is easy to deploy and manage because it is a managed service. Unlike frequently deployed proxy solutions, it does not require users to configure virtual machines (VMs) to run and scale the proxy. Security patching is handled automatically. As your business and outbound traffic grows, Cloud SWP takes care of growing your proxy infrastructure for you.
Secure Web Proxy can also help make cloud migrations more seamless. If you are using an on-premises proxy, you can easily port the existing proxy’s policies to Cloud SWP when you migrate the app, maintaining the same egress protection in the cloud as you had on-premises.
Customer testimonials
Preview customers validated the operational and security value of implementing Cloud SWP:
“Google’s Secure Web Proxy is a powerful tool that can help businesses of all sizes protect their cloud workloads from online threats. By using the granular policy controls and TLS inspection, we are ensuring that our cloud applications only access approved external destinations. Additionally we are able to comply with data security regulations,” said David Saleh, director, Cloud Architecture and Application Security, ATB Financial.
“Secure Web Proxy has helped us to improve our security in Google Cloud. We are now able to filter outbound HTTP and HTTPS traffic from our applications. In addition, having a native solution will allow us to replace the VM-based solution we currently have, providing us with cost savings and continuing to deliver on our strategy of replacing products with cloud native services,” said Roberto Vega, cloud analyst, Carrefour.
Getting started with Secure Web Proxy
You can get started with Cloud SWP by visiting our documentation page to learn more about Cloud SWP prerequisite requirements and configuration options. If you want to quickly evaluate Cloud SWP for your cloud environment, use the SWP evaluation guide for step-by-step instructions. Be sure to check out all our sessions at this year’s Google Cloud Security Summit.
Latest Enhancements in reCAPTCHA Enterprise Helps Govts Sites Protect against Digital Frauds
2996
Of your peers have already read this article.
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Download our guidebook to learn how reCAPTCHA Enterprise can help strengthen your website security quickly.
Cyber threats on the rise
In 2021, the United States saw 40.5% of website attacks committed through “bad bots” on the internet, with 37.2% of government website traffic being bad bots, according to research by cybersecurity firm Imperva1. As cyber threats increase, government agencies need a way to safely let constituents access digital services. Google Cloud reCAPTCHA Enterprise protects websites by distinguishing between humans and bots. Full-scale implementation of reCAPTCHA Enterprise solution expands on bot detection to protect public sector websites from a broad range of digital fraud. Below are some highlights from our new reCAPTCHA Enterprise guidebook detailing functional enhancements and ways for government agencies to take advantage of enterprise capabilities.
Advanced website protection
reCAPTCHA Enterprise builds upon the existing reCAPTCHA API that has defended 5+ million websites for over a decade. It uses advanced risk analysis techniques to distinguish between humans and bots, protecting sites from spam and abuse as well as detecting other fraudulent activities, including credential stuffing, account takeovers (ATO), and automated account creation.
How it works
Detecting password leaks and credential breaches
With reCAPTCHA Enterprise’s password leak protection, agencies can conduct regular audits of user credentials, such as passwords, to detect leaks and breaches and prevent account takeovers (ATOs), as well as credential stuffing attacks.
UI challenge vs. frictionless
reCAPTCHA Enterprise returns a score, giving you the ability to take a number of actions, including requiring additional factors of authentication or throttling bots that may be scraping content. This functionality allows you to verify if an interaction is legitimate without any user interaction.
User-friendly migration
Google Cloud’s reCAPTCHA Enterprise offers a simple migration process in which your account is moved from the reCAPTCHA Admin to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) after you create a project to migrate it to. Watch our 10-minute webinar to see how.
A cost-effective upgrade to a standard cybersecurity solution
Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise comes with 99.9%+ uptime, multi-factor authentication, and support for Android, iOS, and web applications. Our reCAPTCHA offering is structured in a way that allows you to fully control your investment and responsibly allocate taxpayer dollars.
reCAPTCHA Enterprise in action
Google Cloud’s reCAPTCHA protects against key automated attacks, including account creation, credential stuffing, cashing out, denial of inventory, and skewing. State governments have found success with using Google Cloud’s reCAPTCHA for cyber risk management. Wisconsin’s Workforce Development Agency used fraud detection and identification, including reCAPTCHA, to mitigate malicious bot logins on its external website, and several agencies in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have implemented reCAPTCHA to prevent bots from booking and reselling COVID-19 vaccine appointments.
Protecting public sector websites from bad actors can be challenging, especially with emerging threats from adversaries and extremist groups. Google Cloud’s reCAPTCHA Enterprise offers comprehensive website security solutions to successfully protect against cyber threats.
Download our reCAPTCHA Enterprise guidebook for a detailed look at how you can use reCAPTCHA Enterprise to strengthen your website security and implement the solution quickly and easily.
References:
5277
Of your peers have already downloaded this article
10:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
The age of unthinking fears about cloud security is over. Not only is cloud adoption rising steadily across geographies, industries and job functions, but confidence in cloud security is rising as well — to the point where increased security is a major reason enterprises opt for cloud solutions.
Gone are the days when organizations accessed applications and infrastructure over the internet only because it was the least expensive way to scale compute, storage and networking resources as business needs changed. The cloud today is a strategic necessity, with increased agility, integration and speed (as well as security) being the prime drivers of its increased adoption.
This MIT SMR survey of security professionals studies trends in security, which workloads are seeing the highest cloud utilization, the steady growth of comfort with cloud security–and interestingly paints a picture of the executives who are holding out with regards to cloud security.
Download the report now!
3346
Of your peers have already watched this video.
3:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
How to Retrace the Steps of a Potential Phishing Attack with Threat Analytics
The majority of cyber attacks begin with phishing emails and websites. Attackers use many tricks, including by leveraging enterprise brand assets, such as company names and logos, to develop phishing websites that appear authentic and lure internet users to enter valuable information such as user names and passwords.
Experts say that today’s CISOs need to treat a potential phishing email like a crime scene. We need to use the evidence that we have to carry out the investigation. A common phishing email will sound like this: “Hello! Your security software has expired. Please click this link to renew it.”
This is where Google’s Backstory makes an entry. Find out how it can help trace the steps of what happened to conduct a thorough threat analysis of your network.
More Relevant Stories for Your Company
How AI-powered ML Models Helps Run Unemployment Claims Verification at Scale
With unemployment application submissions reaching record numbers over the past year, state and local agencies in the United States have faced the challenge of processing unprecedented numbers of claims per week. The digital infrastructure most agencies have in place is unable to handle this volume, resulting in constituents waiting longer,
New ML-Powered API Abuse Detection
API security incidents are increasingly common and disruptive. With the growth of API traffic, enterprises across the world are also experiencing an uptick in malicious API attacks, making API security a heightened priority. According to our latest API Security Research Report, 50% of organizations surveyed have experienced an API security incident
Google Cloud’s Accountability and Transparency Adheres to EU’s Stringent Compliance Policies
Google Cloud's industry-leading controls, contractual commitments, and accountability tools have helped organizations across Europe meet stringent data protection regulatory requirements for years. This commitment to supporting the compliance efforts of European companies has earned us the trust of businesses like retailers, manufacturers and financial services providers. As part of our
Cloud Computing Boosts Productivity for Small Farms in India
AgroStar launched a multilingual mobile app using Google Cloud that is helping to boost crop yields and increase income for small farmers in India. Google Cloud results Enables technology modules to speed loan processing, identify crop diseases, and enhance supply chain logistics Delivers high rates of analytics processing to serve
