Legacy network-based technologies, such as firewalls or virtual machines, provided adequate workload protection back when business took place on-premises and IT teams had a far smaller volume of data to worry about. These methods stood up relatively well because cyberattacks weren’t nearly as advanced or intrusive as they are now, and furthermore, cloud application use was not yet ubiquitous.
It goes without saying that the world has transformed just a bit since the turn of the decade. Not only do employees now work from everywhere, but cloud and cloud native applications have become necessary for everyday productivity.
IT and security professionals have discovered that legacy technology doesn’t translate well into cloud environments. These environments are elastic, only loosely coupled to infrastructure, and lack a static perimeter at which to place security controls. Furthermore, most enterprises use a combination of cloud service providers and the data center to house applications and communicate workflows, complicating the task of gaining consistent visibility over them.
What this means is that applications and services need to be at the center, rather than the fringes, of security planning.
The Changing Dynamic
Instead of the network paths applications traverse, controls should be tied directly to the identity of the communicating applications and services. It’s no longer sufficient to define software by its address or traffic route—address-based controls are susceptible to change, especially in a cloud environment, forcing security teams to build more and more rules to compensate.
The ephemeral nature of the cloud presents multiple challenges to security teams. Legacy security technologies are based on a trust model that’s no longer valid in today’s threat landscape. Perimeters have all but disappeared, encryption makes traffic inspection difficult, and classifying distributed data is resource-intensive. At the same time, all these challenges make the cloud especially attractive to attackers.
