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Eliminate Cloud Security Risks with Packet-Level Visibility

As public cloud adoption grows, so do security concerns. While organizations move workloads to public cloud environments like Amazon Web Services (AWS) to reduce IT costs and hassles, security is not 100% transferable to the cloud provider. Security is a shared responsibility. The cloud provider secures the infrastructure, but data and application protection and regulatory compliance remain the customer's obligation.

If you want to move more workloads to the public cloud, but worry about jeopardizing IT security and performance, consider adopting a multi-tiered security model with visibility into virtual network traffic. A best practice approach is to enable packet-level cloud visibility, in conjunction with cloud-native tools. Here are some of the common challenges network and security teams face with public cloud computing and how to address them with superior network visibility.

Eliminate Public Cloud Security Risks with Packet-Level Network Visibility

Visibility into your IT environment is essential. You can't protect what you can't see. However, data inspection and accessing network traffic increases in difficulty when moving workloads to a public cloud. It's vital to have a reliable tool that enables IT to see gaps that can lead to exposed data or increased vulnerabilities.

Complete cloud visibility is attainable with a solution that gives you the ability to:

  • Access, capture, and monitor network traffic so you can observe data-in-motion
  • Visualize the data transferred between the internal network and the cloud infrastructure to enhance your security posture

Optimize security and performance monitoring tools

Network and security tools are necessary to identify threats and expose anomalies. Do your traditional tools work in a cloud environment? Probably not well, if at all. Monitoring tools need visibility to packet-level data that flows in and out of the cloud to expose risk.

The firehose approach is not effective with expensive, mission-critical tools. The IT team must have the ability to track east-west traffic and monitor network tap points. As more workloads move to the cloud, the ability to filter traffic, which a visibility solution does, helps to improve tool longevity and effectiveness.

The ideal situation is to filter traffic of interest of the cloud infrastructure to:

  • Streamline the flow of information with the right data to the right tools
  • Filter within the cloud and then send directly to the appropriate tool of the on premises network which enhances the effectiveness of legacy tools and lessens the chance for information overload

Automate instead of disrupt application performance

Manual processes consume precious time. Moving to the cloud can complicate some functions, especially those associated with application security, usage, and efficiency. Adding visibility and security tools to an application is disruptive and time-consuming, but necessary to extend protection in a public cloud.

With cloud network visibility at the packet level, network and security professionals can:

  • Automate tedious tasks so they can focus on operational matters
  • Reduce the work they have in securing applications in the cloud

Monitor and expand applications running in Containers

Container technology has been around for some time, but its widespread use is emerging rapidly. Protecting applications in containers is one of IT's most significant security concerns.

Container visibility and multi-region support alleviate these issues by:

  • Expanding the ability to monitor applications and improve application development and testing
  • Monitoring network activity from a cloud-based endpoint in a virtual machine or container, so IT and security administrators can see specific network threats

Meet fluctuating traffic demands with deep visibility that scales

Network traffic and congestion is a challenge that never goes away. Managing and securing traffic peaks and valleys is one of the hardest jobs the network team has. Packet-level visibility that is elastic, or auto-scales, as cloud traffic fluctuates, is a sound approach to improve network operation, monitoring, and efficiency.

With elastic monitoring, the network team can:

  • Maintain visibility over any new instances that occur and automatically scale up and down with the public cloud infrastructure
  • Get the time they need to focus on mission-critical activities

Identify and react quickly to security threats

Cybersecurity threats are lurking everywhere. Securing your public cloud requires a multi-pronged strategy and speed matters when mitigating, identifying, and combating risks. Fast detection enables fast action.

Regrettably, yesterday's prevention techniques don't work in today's evolving cyber threat landscape -- especially in the public cloud. Cloud-native response techniques are necessary to uncover and isolate vulnerabilities.

Advanced visibility equips your team with knowledge and the ability to:

  • Achieve visibility into the infrastructure environment for organizational awareness of abnormalities
  • Provide redundancy to detect and solve issues quickly and eliminate zero-day security vulnerabilities in unpatched software

This is just the beginning!

Did you find some new strategies on how to secure your public cloud with network visibility in this post?

We hope we've provided some great answers on how you can monitor and secure your network environments with cloud visibility and monitoring. End-to-end elastic cloud visibility is vital for network performance and data security.

Do you want to learn more about how to eliminate security risks in AWS Public Cloud with an elastic cloud visibility solution so that you can accelerate your public cloud adoption and digital transformation? You're in luck. We've got so much more to share on this very topic!

APCON believes our elastic cloud visibility solution, IntellaCloud for AWS, is the best approach for AWS cloud security. Mohit Jalori, APCON's Regional Director of Engineering, provides an overview of IntellaCloud on our webinar, How to Eliminate Security Risk with Superior Cloud Network Visibility, and several relevant topics including:

  • Public cloud shared responsibility model
  • Visibility challenges when migrating workloads to the cloud
  • Best practices for cloud traffic monitoring
  • IntellaCloud for AWS: APCON's cloud-native visibility solution

Don't miss out on learning how to eliminate cloud security risks.

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NEW Firmware/Software Release: IntellaView v1.12 is now available for download.
NEW Firmware/Software Release: IntellaView v1.12 is now available for download.

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