“By 2025, 85% of infrastructure strategies will integrate on-premises, colocation, cloud and edge delivery options, compared with 20% in 2020,” said David Cappuccio, distinguished VP analyst; Henrique Cecci, senior director, Gartner Research Report – “Your Data Center May Not Be Dead, but It’s Morphing,” September 17, 2020.
If today, organizations are struggling to secure on-premises, private clouds or public clouds as separate infrastructure setups, what more will it be like for them as they move to this multi-hybrid future? Employers may have successfully moved everyone to remote work but the haste with which the move was done may have left some exposed to cyber threats.
What can CISOs do to ensure their organisation is protected?
FutureCIO spoke to Gary Gardiner, head of security engineering, APAC & Japan at Check Point Software Technologies, on how security measures are evolving in the hybrid environment post-COVID-19.
What's new in the hybrid data centre?
Gary Gardiner: We are seeing innovations around the ability of a hybrid data centre to provide runtime as well as Application Program Interface (API) security. This means that the hybrid data centre secures what is already within legacy systems with the new agile and extended environment.
Security is “shifting left”, where the codebase is to be designed as secure from the start with a thorough examination of all communications, rather than just scrutinising the data in transit and at rest inside the cloud.
We need to pore deep into the code and all API calls powering all the services in the cloud, to ensure that nothing malicious or remotely suspicious is taking place in these environments.
What are the pain points when it comes to securing the hybrid data centre?
Gary Gardiner: Check Point Software has seen organisations spend a long time developing the systems they have in place to provide the visibility and security that they need in their legacy data centres.
One major pain point businesses face in securing the hybrid data centre is trying to achieve the security parity between what they expected in their legacy on-premise data centre with that of their cloud and virtualised environments, as these environments are radically different.
Another major challenge is the migration of services to the cloud. The cloud environment is radically different from on-premise legacy systems, and have nuanced and specific demands to implementation and security, and additional hurdles to achieve security and operational parity between integrated legacy data centres with the cloud.
How do you provide cybersecurity assurance when you operate in a hybrid work environment - remote-office work in a combination of hybrid DC environments?
Gary Gardiner: We must first understand that no network, however obscure, is immune from cyberattacks.
There are 2 fundamental things we must look at in a hybrid data centre environment. First, we must have visibility across both environments. Legacy data centres are fairly static and easy to achieve security visibility. However, in a hybrid environment, we need to ensure we have the same visibility in any change, however difficult to discern, can be isolated and examined in the cloud as well as the legacy data centre.
Second, we must have cybersecurity resilience uniformly across both the legacy data centre and the cloud, where a holistic security approach provides the overarching strategy, and battle-tested tactical implementation of digital and cybersecurity systems provides the resilience to bounce back to operational readiness for the hybrid environment, given that any part of the environment, whether on-premise or in the cloud, will face intrusions frequently.
What are the 3 most common issues Check Point sees among ASEAN enterprises?
Gary Gardiner: The first most common issue we see in ASEAN enterprises is the complexity and difficulty in migrating services to the cloud. Many organisations believe that they can migrate all services very quickly to the cloud, which invariably create a less resilient environment for the short term.
The second most common issue is that organisations must realise that they are still responsible for the data stored in the cloud, and not that of cloud providers.
While cloud providers may provide some degree of security and have performance agreements offering some shared culpability, at the end of the day, organisations are still responsible for the data, and cannot be absolved from legal or other ramifications should cybersecurity incidents occur.
The third most common issue is that some organisations are unaware of the dynamic and transient nature of the cloud, and how even a minute change made by the provider, or the client organisation can have an effect on its security posture, ranging from minor to drastic.
For example, a business can create a database server instance on the cloud, that would have direct access to the Internet. Such a server would put the data at risk of exposure.
Understanding that any data stored on the cloud should be treated as public and therefore insecure, with a security framework that encapsulates as many security layers as humanly possible, to reduce the possible attack or intrusion surfaces from threat actors, and to afford effective resilience actions whenever security policies are breached.
