Today's cloud gen enterprises need holistic security infrastructure

IT firms are going through a visible change on how their clients and employees are consuming and using technologies. In this race of matching up to these ways and leveraging technology, enterprises continue to adopt cloud applications and infrastructure at an unprecedented speed. Considering, it is critical for these cloud gen enterprises to enable robust protection, a broader and deeper integrated defence to secure against the ever-evolving threats.

Now more than ever we observe increased usage of personally-owned devices for official purposes. In the quest to deliver advanced capabilities, Cloud-based computing platforms are making significant changes to the prescribed IT infrastructure. Considering the transition, it’s important that CISOs keep track of secure sensitive company data and maintain compliance as the critical assets flow between on premise systems, mobile apps and in cloud services. This data might include personal records, protected health information or payment archives.

Blue Coat Elastica Shadow Data Report revealed that 23 percent of all files in cloud apps are broadly shared, and 12 percent of those files contain sensitive or compliance-related data. Variety of point solutions and siloed security tools being used by the firms are insufficient in ensuring desired protection for the critical data, creating security gaps and exposing it to leaks and attacks.

Security measures often offer secluded tools instead of a holistic solution to secure these transformations, thus the cloud generation needs a fresh model of an integrated security. The modern enterprises need to securely enable cloud adoption, while unifying both cloud and traditional on premise environments for seamless security. CISOs will relate to the challenges cloud adoption poses for creating fresh policy with each new vendor, which adds a significant burden considering the manual deployment and maintenance.

Not just, there are key concerns also on the data protection aspect. Enterprises must ensure required security measures for its mobile first employees and remote operating locations despite geographical restrictions, at the same time, protecting the in-transit company data. For instance Data Loss Prevention (DLP) with its cloud-delivered Web Security Service (WSS) by Symantec, provides a secure platform to help ensure a safe web experience and aid CISOs in their mission to protect organisational data.

It is evident that the financial gains motivate cyber criminals to breach these data rich clouds. Industry is witnessing a surge in new security patterns and practices to address the challenges in this cloud-based environment. The aim is to help IT regain control by setting policies consistently across physical, virtualised, and private cloud, and public cloud infrastructures; acquiring visibility into policy deployment and enforcement; and, finally, auditing those policy controls. Governance, protection, visibility, and auditability are key elements to establishing confidence and trust in the cloud.

A security strategy for the cloud

To shrink the existing gaps and overcome the mentioned challenges, enterprises need a single partner that understands the importance of information security from end to end. We recently announced a Cloud Security Platform that offers advanced capabilities for securing critical assets, data and users across the cloud continuum, while leveraging the power of Symantec’s category-leading security solutions in their journey to the cloud.

Securing users and data beyond traditional borders

• Enterprises must ensure safety for mobile users and remote offices from anywhere in the world while, at the same time, protecting organisational data as it is in transit.
• As users and remote offices move beyond the traditional perimeter, advanced protection must follow them regardless of their location.
• Without proper visibility, control and protection of public cloud workloads, organisational risk is substantially increased as enterprises move to leverage their applications in these cloud environments.
• As enterprises provision new cloud applications and services, it is critical that they secure both their cloud workloads and networked environments for complete application protection
• Symantec’s Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solution now supports Microsoft Azure, which allows organisations to monitor and log user activity while leveraging behavioural analytics and machine learning to detect account breaches.

-by Atul Anchan, Director Systems Engineering – India, Symantec