This post was sponsored by Verisign.
Hybrid architectures are a reality in today’s complex enterprise environments. The pervasiveness, affordability, and flexibility of cloud infrastructure and services are driving organizations to choose a mixture of on premise, private, and public cloud computing capabilities to meet their needs. So far we have laid out a roadmap for the development of a framework for resilient cybersecurity that includes threat intelligence, tool selection, and incident response. However, we haven’t covered the role that cloud computing can play in enhancing this framework.
Just as organizations look to enhance their capabilities by implementing cloud-based services, the same approach can be applied to extend the capabilities of an organization’s cybersecurity framework. According to the team at Verisign Security Services (see Framework for Resilient Cybersecurity), “For certain types of business needs (resiliency, availability, etc.) cloud-based security services often offer more enhanced capabilities, the ability to scale (worldwide points-of-presence and increased capacity to handle large attacks), and greater expertise and global intelligence than a single enterprise can provide on its own—at lower cost and quicker time to deployment.”
In essence, organizations can leverage the resilience, scalability, and increased capacity of cloud-based security services as a force multiplier to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of its internal cybersecurity capabilities. Additionally, through the use of standards based APIs, it is possible to aggregate data and correlate events across on premise and cloud-based systems to enrich the visibility into user behavior and enable quicker detection and response activities.
Enterprises are continually evolving to meet the unique and ever changing demands of the organizations they support. Likewise, the threat landscape is constantly growing and changing to take advantage of new, zero day vulnerabilities. As enterprises continue to evolve, the cybersecurity perimeter becomes harder to define and the attack surface increases, making it difficult for organizations to keep pace with the threats. To combat this, enterprises should consider a shift toward a flexible framework that empowers resilient cybersecurity capabilities reaching beyond on premise systems and into the cloud.
To learn more about each of the recommendations presented in this blog series, read Verisign’s paper entitled, “Framework for Resilient Cybersecurity”.
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