Organizations are increasingly migrating to cloud-based services to handle sensitive data and business processes, meaning security teams need to carefully review and understand what security controls are available to help protect them.
Given the pace of cloud adoption, security teams need to increase security automation efforts and employ tools that can better secure their cloud assets through improved visibility.
SANS is hosting an informative webcast on Wednesday, September 23, at 1:00 PM EDT (17:00:00 UTC) to present the findings from a new survey that examines the organizational use of public and private clouds and outlines best practices for assuring a robust security posture.
The webcast is scheduled in conjunction with the release of the highly anticipated SANS whitepaper on cloud security titled Orchestrating Cloud Security (PDF), written by analyst and network security specialist Dave Shackleford.
The whitepaper presents the results from a survey 485 IT professionals who use different cloud providers and service models for a variety of business needs, including collaboration services, email, managed services, backups for disaster recovery, and other common use cases for cloud services.
Although cloud services provide the functionalities businesses need today, the survey reveals that they also come with inherent security risks.
The SANS survey found that 40% of the respondents acknowledge they process sensitive data in the cloud, and are facing increasing challenges related to access control, configuration management, compliance demands, overall visibility, and the implementation of security controls.
New technologies are emerging as part of the security-as-a-service (SecaaS) model, which are security-oriented cloud-based services that integrate with provider platforms to protect data in cloud ecosystems.
“Although many controls are still managed internally, SecaaS is emerging as a viable means to enhance security in the cloud environment. Security teams should start considering the use of SecaaS options when designing and architecting cloud security models,” the SANS survey notes.
In the upcoming webcast, Shackleford will be joined by myself (Evident.io’s Andrew Maguire), Intel Security’s Margaret Diego, CloudPassage‘s Sami Laine, and Mark Painter from HP Enterprise Security to discuss:
- How organizations use the cloud
- What types of information they store in the cloud
- What concerns they have about data security
- How much they rely on cloud service providers and what difficulties they face
- What security and data protection technologies they use in the cloud environment
- How they manage cloud users
- And much more
The SANS survey clearly highlights and validates the challenges of cloud migration across companies of all sizes. Organizations moving workloads to cloud architectures such as Amazon AWS understand the flexibility and cost efficiencies gained – but often struggle with new best practices and the shared responsibility needed to maintain a secure cloud-computing environment.
The porting of traditionalsecurity technology and Agent-based solutions used in the past do not translate well to cloud environments, leaving customers with too much data and poor visibility into critical service configuration or controls that could eventually lead to compromise.
Webcast attendees will be among the first to receive the whitepaper. Join us Wednesday, September 23, at 1:00 PM EDT (17:00:00 UTC) for this timely and informative webcast!
