As more technologies become software-defined, their adoption demands a significant shift in thinking about how a business organizes its value stream. This shift may be difficult, but it enables you to anticipate changes and position your business to react when software-defined technologies emerge.
Recently a new set of tools and practices has emerged to create and manage environments. Known as Infrastructure as Code (IaC), it enables infrastructure management through a software-defined layer.

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The Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved quite rapidly, especially if you consider how long it took for little packet-switching networks like ARPANET to morph into today’s nearly ubiquitous internet. Our nascent IoT ecosystem is already populated by billions of sensors and connected devices, hundreds of millions of servers, and thousands of hybrid clouds serving billions of people… all of them perpetually producing and/or consuming data in an explosion of information.

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Keeping your enterprise data safe and secure is more important now than it ever has been. IT has always been an ever-changing industry, but in recent years, it has been changing more and more quickly. Now, thanks to the cloud, big data, and mobile devices all expanding at once, it may seem like the entire IT field is completely different every other day. This means your company is going to almost always be re-evaluating and upgrading your network security tools and methods. It’s hard to deal with the current threats to your data, never mind prepare for new ones.

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With major technology companies and startups seriously embracing Cloud strategies, now is the perfect time to attend 21st Cloud Expo October 31 – November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, and June 12-14, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and learn what is going on, contribute to the discussions, and ensure that your enterprise is on the right path to Digital Transformation.

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Four in five respondents say cloud adoption in their organisations will not be put off by high profile cyber-attacks, according to a new study from software and IT services provider Advanced.

The survey, which polled more than 500 senior executives in UK organisations and was conducted through Techmarketview, found that the majority of firms said they were concerned about security and data protection in the cloud, with 82% and 68% responding respectively, yet prefer to carry on with their migration plans.

Despite this, more than three quarters (76%) of those polled said governments should do more to protect businesses and customers from cyber threats, while a larger number (82%) said cloud providers need to step up to build confidence among those looking to adopt a digital transformation strategy.

The inspiration for the survey appears to have been taken from two sources; the recent WannaCry attack which took down the NHS – and appears to be wreaking havoc elsewhere – as well as the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation. As the report’s introduction puts it, “cloud has become an essential ingredient in the digital era, despite adversity from new cyber-attacks and data legislation.”

One in three respondents said they were ‘experienced’ in the cloud, while only 27% of organisations said they used cloud-based financial management systems. These figures show there is still some way to go, and the report again intimates it’s on the industry’s head to get it right.

“As an industry and profession, we all need to proactively give clear guidance on security responsibilities and support organisations in being better protected, ensuring devices and applications are properly patched and secured,” said Jon Wrennall, CTO at Advanced.

“There’s still a job to be done in creating trust in the cloud and helping customers use the cloud in the right way for the digital transformation that’s right for them,” he added. “Our survey shows most organisations want financially stable providers and prefer those that store data locally and offer local support.

“This will become even more pertinent as Britain leaves the European Union – they will trust the providers that offer certainty in an uncertain market and those with a vested interest in the UK and the cloud.”

Elsewhere, a study from storage provider Nexsan has revealed that almost half (48%) of 100 survey respondents were unaware of what GDPR was and what it meant to their organisation.

In this demo presentation at 20th Cloud Expo, David Gildeh, CEO and Co-Founder of Outlyer, discusses self-service monitoring from Outlyer and why it is important. Outlyer is a modern infrastructure monitoring platform designed for easy customization that can monitor all your servers, cloud environments, containers, and services in minutes.

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The Internet giants are fully embracing AI. All the services they offer to their customers are aimed at drawing a map of the world with the data they get. The AIs from these companies are used to build disruptive approaches that cannot be used by established enterprises, which are threatened by these disruptions. However, most leaders underestimate the effect this will have on their businesses.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Rene Buest, Director Market Research & Technology Evangelism at Arago, will discuss the digital enterprise evolution in the context of artificial intelligence.

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By Mathias Widler

Businesses have become painfully aware that conventional approaches — virus signature scanning and URL filtering — are no longer sufficient in the fight against cyberthreats. This is in part because malware is constantly changing, generating new signatures with a frequency that far outpaces the updates of signature detection systems.

In addition, malware today tends to be targeted to specific sectors, companies, or even individual members of a management team, and such targeted attacks are difficult to spot. It has become necessary to use state-of-the-art technology based on behavioural analysis, also known as the sandbox. This blog examines how a sandbox can increase security and it looks at what to consider when choosing a sandbox solution.

The sandbox as a playground against malware

Zero-day ransomware and new malware strains are spreading at a frightening pace. Due to the dynamic nature of the attacks, it is no longer possible to develop a signature for each new variant. In addition, signatures tend to be available only after malware has reached a critical mass — in other words, after an outbreak has occurred. As malware changes its face all the time, the code is likely to change before a new signature for any given type of malware can be developed, and the game starts from scratch. How can we protect ourselves against such polymorphous threats?

There is another trend that should influence your decision about the level of protection you need: malware targeted at individuals. It is designed to work covertly, making smart use of social engineering mechanisms that are difficult to identify as fake. It only take a moment for a targeted attack to drop the harmful payload — and the amount of time between system infection and access to information is getting shorter all the time.

What is needed is a quick remedy that does not rely on signatures alone. To detect today’s amorphous, malicious code, complex behavioural analysis is necessary, which in turn requires new security systems. The purpose of a sandbox is to analyse suspicious files in a protected environment before they can reach the user. The sandbox provides a safe space, where the code can be run without doing any harm to the user’s system.

The right choice to improve security

Today’s market appears crowded with providers offering various solutions. Some of them include virtualisation technology (where an attack is triggered through what appears to be virtual system) or a simulated hardware solution (where the malware is offered a PC), through to solutions in which the entire network is mapped in the sandbox. However, malware developers have been hard at work, too, and a well-coded package can recognise whether a person is sitting in front of the PC, it can detect if it’s in a virtual environment in which case it can alter its behaviour, and it can undermine the sandboxing measures by delaying activation of the malicious code after infection.

So, what should companies look for when they want to enhance their security posture through behavioural analysis?

What to look for in a sandbox

• The solution should cover all users and their devices, regardless of their location. Buyers should check whether mobile users are also covered by a solution
• The solution should work inline and not in a TAP mode. This is the only way one can identify threats and block them directly without having to create new rules through third-party devices such as firewalls
• First-file sandboxing is crucial to prevent an initial infection without an existing detection pattern
• It should include a patient-zero identification capability to detect an infection affecting a single user
• Smart malware often hides behind SSL traffic, so a sandbox solution should be able to examine SSL traffic. With this capability, it is also important to look at performance, because SSL scanning drains a system’s resources. With respect to traditional appliances, a multitude of new hardware is often required to enable SSL scanning — up to eight times more hardware, depending on the manufacturer
• In the case of a cloud sandbox, it should comply with relevant laws and regulations, such as the Federal Data Protection Act in Germany. It is important to ensure that the sandboxing is done within the EU, ideally in Germany. The strict German data protection regulations also benefit customers from other EU countries
• A sandbox is not a universal remedy, so it should, as an intelligent solution, be able to work with other security modules. For example, it is important to be able to stop the outbound traffic to a command-and-control (C&C) centre in the case of an infection. In turn, it should be possible to turn off the infected computer by tracing back the C&C communication

Putting it all together

All these criteria can be covered by an efficient and highly integrated security platform, rather than individual hardware components (“point” appliances). One advantage of such a model is that you get almost instantly correlated logs from across the security modules on the platform without any manual interaction. If a sandbox is part of the platform, the interplay of various protection technologies through the automated correlation of data ensures faster and significantly higher protection. This is because it is no longer necessary to feed the SIEM system manually with logs from different manufacturers.

Platform models do not lose any information as they allow all security tools — such as proxy, URL filters, antivirus, APT protection, and other technologies — to communicate with one another. It eliminates the time-consuming evaluation of alerts, as the platform blocks unwanted data extraction automatically. A cloud-based sandbox together with a security platform is, therefore, an effective solution. It complements an existing security solution by adding behavioural analysis components to detect previously unknown malware and strengthens the overall security posture — without increasing operating costs.

The post How to choose a sandbox first appeared on The Zscaler Blog.