Forty months is not a lot of time to design, develop and deliver something monumental. Consider that it took 182 years to build the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, 20 years to build the Great Pyramid of Giza and 10 years to build the Panama Canal. Executives from digital-leading companies, however, tell us that in just over three years – the year 2020 – 17 different digital technologies will dramatically impact the way they work, and transform the work that gets done, so we don’t have much time.

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@ThingsExpo has been named the ‘Top WebRTC Influencer’ by iTrend. iTrend processes millions of conversations, tweets, interactions, news articles, press releases, blog posts – and extract meaning form them and analyzes mobile and desktop software platforms used to communicate, various metadata (such as geo location), and automation tools. In overall placement, @ThingsExpo ranked as the number one ‘WebRTC Influencer’ followed by @DevOpsSummit at 55th.

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As digital transformations gather pace across the enterprise, companies are faced with a range of difficult challenges to overcome. Maintaining security in the face of cloud adoption, a flood of personal mobile devices in the workplace, and the sharp rise in internet-connected devices can seem daunting. These technology trends are maturing and businesses are looking for ways to combine them and differentiate themselves in the marketplace.

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«There’s a clear point of entry for web attacks. Everyone knows where it is. If we could get smart about inspecting what’s coming in through that ‘door,’ we could not only get a lot of security benefits, it’s also a better way to do business,» explained Jaeson Yoo, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Penta Security Systems Inc., in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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With artificial intelligence and big data making prominent waves in industries everywhere, IBM is offering several new cloud services that will pair with their BlueMix service. It will offer better organization, smoother data generation, and accelerated migration to the cloud. Ultimately, businesses can experience greater effectiveness in every department.

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DevOps and microservices are permeating software engineering teams broadly, whether these teams are in pure software shops but happen to run a business, such Uber and Airbnb, or in companies that rely heavily on software to run more traditional business, such as financial firms or high-end manufacturers. Microservices and DevOps have created software development and therefore business speed and agility benefits, but they have also created problems; specifically, they have created software security issues.

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Leading cloud-centric IT organizations are establishing core capabilities to improve productivity, control costs and provide a highly responsive end-user experience. Key steps along this journey include creating an end-user cloud services catalog, automating workflows and provisioning, and implementing IT showback and chargeback. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Mark Jamensky, executive vice president of Products at Embotics, walked attendees through an in-depth case study of enterprise IT management products provider Serena Software and its journey to enhancing ITaaS and IT cost visibility capabilities. The session shared best practices, lessons learned and key technologies used along the way.

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(c)iStock.com/alashi

Imagine an IT security team as a navy crew at sea. A torpedo blasts the ship’s side below the water line. As the water floods in, they can’t even see the hole, let alone fix it. Instead, everyone turns to the pumps to keep the ship afloat.

This is the state of many security programs today. Despite a plethora of point solutions, security teams lack visibility into what they’re trying to protect, their most pressing risks and the security tools at their disposal. Thus security teams operate in constant reactionary mode, while a strategic, proactive security program remains elusive.

The growing popularity of virtual networks further complicates visibility issues. Virtual machines are spun up at a moment’s notice, and security groups and tags are assigned – but not necessarily in line with broader security policies. Network security teams may have no access to management consoles and limited insight as to how changing network architectures affect their attack surface.

But with comprehensive network modeling extending into virtual networks, network security engineers can gain the needed visibility to unify security and compliance processes across their hybrid hardware and virtual environments.

Verifying access

A major challenge to policy and access verification in hybrid environments is complexity. The mixture of physical, virtual and cloud networks with their various security groups and tags, as well as traditional ACLs, makes manual comparison and analysis almost impossible. But by normalising this data and combining hybrid network policies, network access can be analysed end to end and visualised within the model.

Microsegmentation challenges

Historically, data centres have been protected by perimeter security technologies analysing north-south traffic –traffic into and out of the data centre. Traditional data centre designs assume that all east-west traffic – traveling within the data centre – occurs in trusted, well-protected zones. Recent data breaches, however, have shown that this assumption is no longer valid. Microsegmentation is capable of dividing east-west traffic within the data centre into smaller, more protected zones; but without security visibility into how microsegmentation is implemented, it’s difficult to verify policy is adhered to across the network.

By combining and modeling north-south and east-west policies network security teams can gain end-to-end access visibility throughout their hybrid network. Model-driven visibility also provides a more realistic view of applied policy at the host level rather than verifying access only at “chokepoints” or gateways to the virtual network.

Vulnerability detection in virtual networks

One added benefit of modeling virtual and cloud environments is scanless vulnerability detection. Security analytics applied to the model can deduce vulnerabilities using product configuration and version information. This can significantly decrease reliance on active or third-party scans which are harder to operate on virtual and cloud networks. Incorporating vulnerability intelligence gives a fuller picture of how these networks impact overall risk.

Visualisation

By unifying hybrid IT environments in one model and normalising their data, organisations can break down the barriers that traditionally existed between physical, virtual and cloud networks for comprehensive, streamlined security management.

This information can be further distilled into a simple picture of the organisation’s unique attack surface. Using attack surface visualisations, CISOs to “in-the-trenches” security practitioners to board members can quickly see the interconnectedness of their IT infrastructure and where their most critical security exposures lurk. Attack surface visibility gives an intuitive and deeply analytical tool to make fast, informed decisions regarding incident response, operations and security investments. It provides a common language and reference to stop reacting to symptoms and start treating root causes of security issues, creating a proactive, holistic security program.

(c)iStock.com/alashi

Imagine an IT security team as a navy crew at sea. A torpedo blasts the ship’s side below the water line. As the water floods in, they can’t even see the hole, let alone fix it. Instead, everyone turns to the pumps to keep the ship afloat.

This is the state of many security programs today. Despite a plethora of point solutions, security teams lack visibility into what they’re trying to protect, their most pressing risks and the security tools at their disposal. Thus security teams operate in constant reactionary mode, while a strategic, proactive security program remains elusive.

The growing popularity of virtual networks further complicates visibility issues. Virtual machines are spun up at a moment’s notice, and security groups and tags are assigned – but not necessarily in line with broader security policies. Network security teams may have no access to management consoles and limited insight as to how changing network architectures affect their attack surface.

But with comprehensive network modeling extending into virtual networks, network security engineers can gain the needed visibility to unify security and compliance processes across their hybrid hardware and virtual environments.

Verifying access

A major challenge to policy and access verification in hybrid environments is complexity. The mixture of physical, virtual and cloud networks with their various security groups and tags, as well as traditional ACLs, makes manual comparison and analysis almost impossible. But by normalising this data and combining hybrid network policies, network access can be analysed end to end and visualised within the model.

Microsegmentation challenges

Historically, data centres have been protected by perimeter security technologies analysing north-south traffic –traffic into and out of the data centre. Traditional data centre designs assume that all east-west traffic – traveling within the data centre – occurs in trusted, well-protected zones. Recent data breaches, however, have shown that this assumption is no longer valid. Microsegmentation is capable of dividing east-west traffic within the data centre into smaller, more protected zones; but without security visibility into how microsegmentation is implemented, it’s difficult to verify policy is adhered to across the network.

By combining and modeling north-south and east-west policies network security teams can gain end-to-end access visibility throughout their hybrid network. Model-driven visibility also provides a more realistic view of applied policy at the host level rather than verifying access only at “chokepoints” or gateways to the virtual network.

Vulnerability detection in virtual networks

One added benefit of modeling virtual and cloud environments is scanless vulnerability detection. Security analytics applied to the model can deduce vulnerabilities using product configuration and version information. This can significantly decrease reliance on active or third-party scans which are harder to operate on virtual and cloud networks. Incorporating vulnerability intelligence gives a fuller picture of how these networks impact overall risk.

Visualisation

By unifying hybrid IT environments in one model and normalising their data, organisations can break down the barriers that traditionally existed between physical, virtual and cloud networks for comprehensive, streamlined security management.

This information can be further distilled into a simple picture of the organisation’s unique attack surface. Using attack surface visualisations, CISOs to “in-the-trenches” security practitioners to board members can quickly see the interconnectedness of their IT infrastructure and where their most critical security exposures lurk. Attack surface visibility gives an intuitive and deeply analytical tool to make fast, informed decisions regarding incident response, operations and security investments. It provides a common language and reference to stop reacting to symptoms and start treating root causes of security issues, creating a proactive, holistic security program.