After the rise of ransomware over the last few years (largely combatted through better detection of the malware and more attention paid to having decent backups), phishing has stormed back onto the IT security manager’s radar.

According to our latest survey on IT security in the UK and Ireland, phishing is now the second most pressing cybersecurity issue after data breaches. The survey of 104 IT and security managers found that the majority of organisations report that their security was increasingly failing to block phishing emails over the past year.

With the intensity of phishing attacks increasing, simply waiting for malware to hit the endpoint is not enough. Many organisations have appliances in place within their infrastructure to check data coming into the network to see if it contains malware or phishing attacks. These appliances have to match suspicious content against signatures or carry out heuristic analysis. They also have to be constantly updated as threats change.

Not only that, these email and web content security solutions take up a lot of an IT professional’s time with such tasks as creating spam rules, examining quarantines and creating blocklists. If filtering is too aggressive, there will be more false positives, meaning more time spent in support calls and dealing with complaints. Such manual interventions are a direct result of technology failure.

Users can also be less than vigilant when it comes to clicking on links they see in emails or on the web. User training can help, but it only takes one person to click on something suspicious for an infection to occur.

Cybercriminals are getting smarter and will adapt quickly to any security measures put in place – basic security measures may weed out a lot of spam, but are no good against today’s sophisticated, targeted phishing attacks. In order to better protect an enterprise’s infrastructure, preventing phishing and malware should be automatic; it should just work.

Leveraging the cloud

In order to combat the evermore sophisticated phishing attacks we see today, we have to speed up the time it takes to detect and block such attacks. The cloud is by far the best way in which to do that, as everything gets updated instantaneously.

Why is that? Well imagine a vendor with an anti-phishing appliance in their customer’s network. If a vendor’s analysts spot something on that device and decide that it is malware or a phishing attack, they then have to update other appliances (sometimes running into the thousands) around the world. This takes a long time – even if a vendor is really fast, it could still take an hour. Most of the time, it takes far longer. If a vendor uses the word update, they are probably not secure.

All the while, attackers are looking to advanced cloud automation and evasion techniques to bypass these cyber perimeters. A legacy response just isn’t fast enough.

The key to a quick response is not just the cloud, but also automation and artificial intelligence. You have to be proactive to identify and mitigate evolving threats before they become a problem.

The cloud allows you to have a large, distributed system that can actively track millions of new domains and websites every day. This proactively fetches traffic, takes the output from that, whether that is URL lists, drive-by downloads, DNS transactions, etc. and harvest it in a multiple-cloud sandbox in real time without waiting for customers to harvest any data themselves.

Machine learning, analytics and automation

To process all of this information requires big data analytics, large-scale automation and machine learning. With this in-built intelligence, a system, such as the one we offer, can spot anomalies based on the behaviour exhibited. Instead of focusing in on one particular vector, we can analyse a multitude of different vectors including files, emails, domains, among others.

Multiple sandboxes are used in analysis to pinpoint suspicious activity and determine threat levels. This is used to prevent threats way before they can infect systems, saving a lot of money and heartache. Once a threat is detected, all users are protected – instantaneously – that’s the beauty of the cloud.

This new approach to internet security means that enterprises have the means to get ahead of the threats facing their business and protect themselves in seconds, not hours.

Movies habitually dramatise artificial intelligence (AI) as a not just a threat to our jobs, but to humanity itself. But in the real world here and now, AI-driven automation is offering much more in the way of opportunity than threat. Imagine a future where automation is enhancing the work of IT teams, rather than replacing it.

It is well known that IT employees spend a lot of time on repetitive, manual maintenance tasks that could easily be automated. But, with growing demands coming from every angle of the business, the IT team simply can't keep doing everything manually. This is where automation comes in. It’s not going to steal jobs, but rather free up time, enabling the IT team to work on more valuable initiatives and focus on forward-thinking projects and developments that are driving business success in a digital age.

Some businesses have taken the first baby steps to automation by trialing it within specific functional teams, but this has not been replicated throughout the business as a whole. However, with the proliferation of data-intensive applications being used within day-to-day businesses tasks, automation is becoming a clear CIO-priority and gaining traction more widely across organisations.

Automation advantages

One of the biggest challenges faced by IT teams is striking a balance between management and innovation, and this is where automation can help. Automation can absorb mundane and repetitive tasks such as data input and basic infrastructure monitoring – it can essentially lessen the burden on managing so that the team can do more of the innovating. It is also the key to empowering IT teams to deploy more and fail less by removing human errors from the software delivery process. This then enables employees to refocus that time into strategic work and customer experience.

For example, reporting and auditing in financial organisations is critical, but can be a rather onerous task, as well as a time consuming one. With the correctly configured automation platform and tools this can be a faster process for producing more comprehensive reports for the IT team that can easily be read by auditors. In addition, as these reports often change in line with regulatory requirements, having an automation system that can be updated easily for the new requirements is crucial to free your IT team from constantly trying to update the system manually. This means that during this time the IT team can continue to work on strategic tasks like application development, rather than spending all their time manually pulling these documents together.

Now, once businesses have dipped their toes in the automation waters, they may have only seen success by practising it within specific teams. While trialing a new technique in a small group first is an understandable approach, it is not an effective way of utilising this technology and, more often than not, will fail when expanding across the business. Practising automation in silos leads to an abundance of tools adopted by different teams to solve particular problem, which creates additional problem in terms of maintenance costs, team collaboration and skills requirements. It also adds to the complexity generated by operating from a diverse infrastructure, from on-premises to public and private clouds to containerised environments.

Embracing widespread automation is not as simple as just deciding to do it – it is a whole journey which starts with gaining the visibility and insights required to make informed decisions.

Security and compliance

In today’s rapidly evolving IT landscape, most organisations operate a heterogeneous mix of infrastructure spanning on-premises and public cloud environments. This can make it a particularly difficult task for IT teams to implement and maintain security and compliance regulations, be it company or government issued. Compliance regulations are challenging enough, but add to the mix cloud and containers, which are more ephemeral in nature than traditional infrastructure, and more often than not the IT team doesn’t know what they have or where it is – this is the first challenge.

But once the business discovers what it has, and where it all resides, the IT team can clearly see which resources need to be automated most urgently, enabling them to effectively prioritise and take action to ensure the infrastructure remains secure and meets any compliance requirements. This is of particular importance when it comes to auditing, especially in the wake of more stringent regulations like GDPR.

Human errors naturally occur in the software delivery process; in fact 70% of all IT service outages are due to system misconfigurations. However, automation can be used to help IT teams to keep the infrastructure secure and compliant. They can define the businesses’ security and compliance policies as code, and have the automation platform automatically enforce those policies, and remediate any unauthorised changes. In turn this empowers the IT team to focus on other priorities while knowing that the system is ensuring the business remains compliant.

Imagine the possibilities

IT professionals have skills and experience that far supersedes automation platforms. A team that is built into the core of an organisation, that can navigate the ever-changing technology landscape, support the company values and other employees, can never be replaced by automation.

So rather than stealing your job, automation means that the IT team can spend less time inputting data, manually pulling auditing reports or worrying about consistently adhering to compliance regulations. Instead they can refocus and spend it by putting their skills to good use, collaborating to create new applications and enhance and deliver on business objectives.

The good news is that many organisations across Europe are looking to embrace a DevOps-centric approach to their application development and delivery. The bad news is that plenty of hurdles have to be overcome first to achieve this ambition.

That is the key finding from a new study by Claranet, which argues a greater emphasis on cloud usage and automation needs to be seen before DevOps dreams become a reality.

The report, which polled 750 IT professionals across Europe, found almost three in 10 (29%) had already moved towards a DevOps approach, with a further 54% expecting to make the switch in the coming two years. Yet three quarters of those (74%) who had migrated had experienced challenges of some kind, with operations teams limiting the potential of DevOps, and a lack of clear business objectives within management cited.

The company adds that some businesses may see DevOps as a magic switch – which of course will lead to lower expectations.

“DevOps can’t simply be implemented overnight – it requires a period of iterative change in which both the technology and the people at an organisation need to be made ready for it,” said Michel Robert, Claranet UK managing director. “Increased automation is essential to achieving the agility that characterises a successful DevOps approach, so businesses need to take steps to implement new measures to facilitate this.”

Claranet argues that making a shift from continuous integration (CI) to continuous development (CD), where releases are not fixed but can be done in smaller chunks once or twice a week, will help ease the pressure on organisations. “Combining this with the flexibility of cloud will deliver maximum benefits,” added Robert.

This warning strikes a similar note to a piece of research published by the Ponemon Institute in June. According to the Ponemon study, a significant gap remained between organisations’ ideal DevOps and microservices capabilities and what they are actually able to deliver. More than two thirds of respondents said they were ‘constantly challenged’ with the management and tracking of assets in their cloud ecosystem.

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Google promised that its cloud deals were becoming larger and more strategic – and the company can now count on Domino’s Pizza, SoundCloud and PwC among its customers after posting solid financials yesterday.

Total revenues across all of Alphabet for the three months ended June 30 were at $32.7 billion (£25bn), an increase of 26% compared with the second quarter of 2017. Google’s revenues are put into several buckets; ‘other’ revenues, of which Google Cloud is a part, was at $4.4bn, a 36% increase on the previous year, and similar to the previous quarter’s analysis.

The company is also putting its money where its mouth is with regards to investment; the largest number of headcount additions in the most recent quarter were in Google’s cloud business, with the firm bolstering its engineering, sales, and marketing teams.

In an earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai elaborated on the company’s cloudy momentum. “It’s a natural extension of our long time strength in computing, data centres and machine learning,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “We have developed these over many years and they power our own services in the cloud and are now helping others.”

Take Kubernetes as an example of that. Back in June, at the Cisco Live US event, Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene took to the stage to explain her company’s partnership with Cisco and how the two firms were combining in making Kubernetes deployments easier for organisations. Naturally, Greene noted how Google was – and remains – a key adopter of the container tool, being the original designer of the technology.

Ruth Porat, Google’s CFO, noted – as Google’s strategy has been – the importance of building out an ecosystem with cloud at the epicentre. “Given the core capabilities that we are building upon, our technical infrastructure, security app, machine learning, analytical tools, our view is that we’re addressing a rapidly growing market with the core pillars that are needed to win,” Porat told analysts.

“What has been the recurring theme that we’ve talked about… is the need to further build out our go-to-market capabilities and ensure that we’ve got the functional requirements that enterprise customers deserve,” Porat added. “So it’s really looking at the scale of the opportunity [and] the pace of investment that can be done effectively and therefore position us well.”

Yet while Google has been making significant strides over the past 12 months, there is still plenty of manoeuvring to be done yet. According to the most recent figures from Synergy Research, Google ranks no higher than third in any region; apart from in APAC where Alibaba is the second biggest player, it remains an AWS, Microsoft and Google 1-2-3 in the key geographies.

This was a fact noted by Pichai responding to an analyst question around an inflection point in the industry. “For sure, I do think there is an inflection point – and that’s why it feels far from [a] zero sum game,” he said, adding that there was a ‘lot of opportunity’ in multi-cloud. “I think all the major players are definitely seeing traction.”

With Google Next kicking off in San Francisco later today, there was a sense of the company keeping some of its cards close to its chest. Yet a couple of news lines have come through.

A blog post from Tariq Shaukat, president of partners and industry platforms, discussed how financial services firms HSBC and PayPal were taking steps with Google’s cloud. Regular readers of this publication may recall that the former made an appearance at Google Next last March – so what’s new? Rather like the recent customer wins AWS has announced, it’s all about machine learning as a differentiator. In the case of HSBC, it’s being used to detect potential fraud; for PayPal, it’s about adding intelligence to customer experiences.

Expect plenty of discussion and use cases on this in the coming two days – as well as blockchain. A session on Tuesday discusses ‘distributed ledger technology partnerships on Google Cloud’, while a partner blog post, under the ‘unveiling new technology integrations with Google Cloud’ banner, mentions DLT solutions, as well as potential integrations with Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum.

Among Google’s other highlights this quarter were launches in Finland and Switzerland, as well as the acquisition of enterprise cloud migration tool Velostrata.

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Joe Curtis

If your organisation has been considering containers, then security concerns will almost certainly be paramount. Alert Logic, an information security provider, thinks it may have the answer.

The company has launched what is claimed to be the industry’s first intrusion detection system for containers which aims to ‘bring organisations powerful new capabilities to inspect network traffic for malicious activity targeting containers’, in the company’s words.

As Alert Logic is an AWS partner, this release, as part of the company’s Cloud Defender and Threat Manager solutions, focuses on containers deployed on AWS. This does of course include Docker, Kubernetes and CoreOS, as well as Amazon’s Elastic Container Service.

The product aims to snaffle malicious activity at the network layer providing greater visibility into container attacks. According to 451 Research, organisations are delaying container adoption because of security concerns, despite a global market which could top $4 billion by 2022.

“Without real-time detection capabilities, attackers and intruders can lurk within containers installing trojans, malware, ransomware and cryptominers or even corrupting and exfiltrating data,” said Chris Noell, Alert Logic senior vice president of engineering in a statement. “Network detection is critical to providing the visibility into container attacks that other approaches miss.”

As this publication has previously explored, there have been various examples of organisations leaving applications and instances open. In February, security researchers from RedLock revealed that hackers had been running crypto mining scripts on unsecured Kubernetes instances owned by Tesla, while further research found Weight Watchers had also left Kubernetes instances open.

In June, a survey from CyberArk found that IT jobs with the word ‘Kubernetes’ in the title shot up year over year – so the need for security is evident. According to Lacework, who revealed the Weight Watchers snafu, organisations need to perform a few tasks to get up to speed with a Kubernetes security policy. Companies need to build a pod security policy, configure pods to run real-only file systems, and restrict privilege escalation, among other tips.

You can find out more about Alert Logic’s container security tools here.