Automating security measures

When adopting a hybrid cloud, your workloads can deploy in a range of environments – bare metal, virtual machine, or public clouds – and thus security becomes more complex.

The growth of heterogeneous environments will increase the risk and make manual compliance monitoring almost impossible.

The application teams, infrastructure teams, and security teams of different environments work within their own boundaries and zones leaving a blind side to the vulnerabilities.

With growing footprints and the nature of distributed systems and teams, automation is the only way to prevent inconsistent patching and configurations. Automation helps with the rapid implementation of continuous security and day 2 security operations.

Also, having an enterprise-wide security strategy helps. By bringing a consistent strategy, automation becomes easier and thus you can have an assembly line model where software is delivered at scale in a secure manner. By automatically patching the software, your software and software supply chain can be trusted.

Automation needs to come at different levels. Let’s look at them:

• Operating system (OS): Having a hardened OS as per compliance and performing patch management protects the OS from viruses, malware, and remote hacker intrusions. It is important to keep the OS safe by using techniques such as antivirus software, endpoint protection, patch updates, traffic monitoring, and firewalls, and by providing the least privileges.
• Provisioning of systems: System provisioning is a repeated task and is a great candidate for automation. Integrated IT Service Management (ITSM) – for example, ServiceNow – to provision systems in pre-defined secure ways by running playbooks is key to achieving automation.
• Workflow management: Workflows or pipelines can build a software factory where your applications have to pass security gates at the time of building. Before deployment and during packaging, your application components go through scanning and are key to DevSecOps.

You can start with iterative steps and start automating your daily tasks to secure your stack. Security at every step and every layer is important to keep your organization safe and mitigate your risk of misconfiguration and attacks. Now, let’s look at how to enable your applications for adopting a hybrid cloud.