SINGAPORE, November 23, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Recently, despite initial cybersecurity concerns, the benefits of the agility and scalability enabled by cloud computing have outweighed the security and performance risks, particularly during the pandemic lockdowns of recent years.
Vladimir M. Yordanov, Senior Director of Solution Engineering for Gigamon Asia Pacific and Japan
A study commissioned by Gigamon and conducted by Frost & Sullivan titled “Cybersecurity, Visibility, and the Cloud” found that 53 percent of APAC organizations have more than half of their enterprise workloads in the cloud, with the majority prefers a hybrid approach combining on-premise environments with cloud infrastructure.
This exacerbates visibility concerns, especially since 90 percent of APAC organizations use at least two cloud service providers (CSPs) for strategic reasons such as competitive pricing and avoiding vendor lock-in.
This points to the inevitable: organizations must begin to balance the risk of hosting their workloads in multiple environments with the productivity and agility gains that cloud computing offers.
With cloud adoption growing, the hybrid cloud trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
Even though APAC organizations prefer to retain much control over their infrastructure and data to get as much visibility as possible, whether on-premises, hybrid or multi-cloud.
An expanding IT inventory and the challenge of transparency
44% of APAC companies surveyed have 50-81% of their workloads on an Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform. Visibility is expected to become exponentially difficult as the majority of organizations have at least two CSPs forecasting growth in device endpoints and attack surfaces.
Additionally, 86 percent of respondents in APAC agree that visibility of network traffic from cloud security tools is important, if not critical. There is an awareness of the need to maintain data fidelity by streamlining all cloud traffic and the platform was designed as an approach to achieve this.
Growing cloud diversity and compliance
Businesses are now willing to compromise and find a balance between cybersecurity risks and the efficient productivity that cloud computing enables.
The answer to this balance is a comprehensive view of network activity within an organization’s perimeter. But network monitoring and security tools designed for an on-premises world typically lack visibility into cloud environments, applications, and services. The same goes for agent-based and log-based cloud monitoring and security tools.
This is a major challenge for understanding traffic behavior and data residing in virtual machines and containers.
This opaque network traffic and the confusing proliferation of cloud security tools, which 68 percent of CIOs surveyed by Frost & Sullivan update every 3 to 4 years, are huge barriers to visibility.
Overall, the following factors increase agility, but also diversity and thus complexity when securing the cloud:
- Deployment architecture – on-premises, in the cloud, hybrid, virtual
- Deployment Types – Multi-Cloud, Cloud Service Levels
- OSI layers – applications, networks, devices
- number of providers
With full visibility, on the other hand, organizations can take control of the entire network infrastructure from the core to the cloud. This is because network, metadata and application level insights provide critical context of the entire network surface for better security and performance management.
Regulatory pressures to be compliant through a more granular view of the attack surface are now turning proper visibility from a good skill to a must-have, and Frost & Sullivan finds that 50 percent of organizations will need more technology investments to comply with this guidance.
The survey report also recommended that cloud tools and processes should be flexible, and this again highlights the need for a platform approach and a solution that is able to seamlessly integrate and provide control at the source of this complexity.
to secure the responsibility
One thing is certain: the role of an organization’s cybersecurity operations must be expanded commensurate with the level of potential risk posed by the increasing use of public clouds. This definitely requires addressing the visibility challenges in public clouds, which Gigamon is uniquely able to solve with its Visibility and Analytics Fabric solutions.
As organizations struggle to protect their environment, they also must grapple with where their cloud providers’ responsibilities end and their responsibilities begin. Cloud providers will always be responsible for securing the physical infrastructure and the virtualization platform, for example with the IaaS model. But it is the customer who is responsible for security in the cloud.
A clear demarcation of responsibilities must be established from the outset. But both parties must work together to protect on-premises applications and data, as well as applications and data in the cloud.
This silo requires effective cloud monitoring that melts the “walls” between vendor and customer views of threat surfaces and provides a single pane of glass to view the entire enterprise IT estate.
Deep continuous visibility at scale with zero latency
Ninety-one percent of Frost & Sullivan respondents admit that visibility of network traffic is critical when evaluating cloud security tools. These CIOs recognize that in order to protect effectively, they need to understand usage patterns and activity on the threat surface.
That Gigamon Hawk Deep Observability Pipeline breaks down the previously mentioned silos by giving different teams – network operations, cloud operations and information security – a clear, complete and consistent view of what is happening across all different environments. This consistent view breaks down traditional silos and provides an opportunity for streamlined, actionable insights that proactively address performance and security risks.
Another criteria CIOs need is the ability to optimize all cloud traffic without sacrificing data fidelity. A best practice approach is to provide a platform-based solution capable of consolidating all cloud traffic to offer a single console.
This many-to-one rationalization also enables organizations to effectively and efficiently enforce Zero Trust policies.
Overall, this also clearly ticks the box for compliance with the guidelines mandated by industry regulators.
Powerful threat intelligence sharing for businesses
Gigamon Hawk integrates with Gigamon’s ThreatINSIGHT to provide more context and insight into the data moving across your network. ThreatINSIGHT is a cloud-based solution that aids in the activities and processes of a Security Operations Center (SOC).
With machine learning (ML), behavioral analytics, and curated threat intelligence that can be integrated by other companies in the same industry, results in the powerful ability to detect known, emerging, and unknown threats. This allows organizations to ensure their incident response, handling, and investigation processes are appropriate for public cloud workloads.
Also helpful is the GigaVUE Cloud Suite, which reduces complexity and costs to finally have visibility into tools and traffic in a multi-architecture environment.
Overall, Gigamon has a suite of observability tools and solutions to help organizations stay compliant with regulatory agency guidelines while fully leveraging the transformative power of public cloud computing in a resource-efficient and cost-effective manner.
About gigamon
Gigamon provides a comprehensive observability pipeline that leverages actionable network-level intelligence to amplify the power of observability tools. This powerful combination enables IT organizations to ensure security and compliance governance, accelerate root cause analysis of performance bottlenecks, and reduce the operational burden associated with managing hybrid and multi-cloud IT infrastructures. The result: modern companies are realizing the full transformational promise of the cloud. Gigamon serves more than 4,000 customers worldwide, including over 80 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, nine of the top 10 wireless carriers, and hundreds of government and educational institutions worldwide. For the full story on how Gigamon can help you realize the power of deep observability, see https://www.gigamon.com/ and keep following us Twitter and LinkedIn.
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