If last year underscored anything, it was the significant and far-reaching impact of breaches by trusted insiders – case in point, the Edward Snowden affair. What makes this such a critical trend for 2014 is the fact that as more and more organizations are adopting cloud strategies, there is now an added layer of complexity and sophistication when it comes to protecting who can access what types of sensitive data. The cloud makes it easier for organizations to conduct business, but that simplicity also translates into easier ways for insiders or un-trusted individuals to steal data – identity has become the new perimeter.
The number of organizations around the globe turning to a combination of traditional computing, virtualization, and public-cloud infrastructure to deliver business applications quickly, efficiently, and cost effectively is growing exponentially. As they migrate systems to the cloud, or leverage the scalability and elasticity of cloud computing to deliver entirely new applications, they can run headlong into security and compliance issues that must be solved to protect systems and make auditors happy. In addition to protecting privileged access to servers and network gear, virtualization and cloud computing add important new items that need to be locked down. First, organizations need to protect virtualization and cloud management consoles that provide unprecedented administrative power to create, configure, delete and copy network and server resources. Second, organizations must ensure the cloud management application programming interfaces (APIs) that transfer enormous administrative power to scripts, programs and DevOps tools are adequately controlled. Companies that want to ensure their data remains safe regardless of whether it is in a traditional database, in the cloud, or some variation of both, now need to seriously consider the security ramifications of having a lax privileged user policy – especially in an era where a few clicks of the mouse in the console, or a few commands in a script can wreak havoc.