We are living in the cloud age of “hybrid” and if you don’t know what that means I will share with you the analogy that springs to my mind.
[easy-tweet tweet=”Hide yo’ wife! Hide yo’ kids! Hide yo’ #Cloud!” user=”neilcattermull @comparethecloud” hashtags=”security, infosec”]
Moving to a centralised cloud environment with options is much like a marriage. Would you get married after the first date? No of course not! So being flexible and living together with a try-before-you-buy approach works. Similarly, you may want to upgrade or change your partner once you have found out they squeeze the toothpaste the wrong way or leave the toilet seat up.
Hybrid, better than divorce says @NEILCATTERMULL
It’s all about the options that suit you at that time, and let’s face it, every divorce will cost you more than the marriage!
Hybrid is just that. Flexibility to other systems that suit you, commitment on your terms, as well as change of life scenarios such as capacity increases or decreases.
However, and it’s a big however, you wouldn’t want someone to steal your partner away from you when you leave them at the bar. You need the security and peace of mind that you, and only you, can see your partner as attractive. Security is of the most paramount importance when talking about cloud environments. The more devices/infrastructure we connect to the outside world directly, or indirectly, requires more protection. Now more than ever as cyber fraud is now more lucrative in one year than all the international drug revenue put together.
[easy-tweet tweet=”Originally developed for the US military Unisys Stealth has upped the ante for #cloud #security” user=”neilcattermull”]
Recently we reviewed a product that just stands out from all the others. What is it? Well it’s a product that was originally developed for the US military, and has recently been redeveloped for commercial use. It’s called Stealth, from our friends at Unisys.
[quote_box_center]Let me just highlight some of the real wow factors:
- It End Point Cloaks – Masking the end point device which is unique in the market place when put together with the other services it delivers – HIPPA and PCI-DSS standards are met.
- Micro-Segmentation – The ability to create communities of interest. e.g separation of environments within the IT Infrastructure estate – you define communities that are only accessible from where you dictate.
- Layer 2 Security – Often called the DLL (data link layer), which is by far the best level of security prior to the network level of the OSI stack.
- Stealth for Cloud – The ability to use Stealth to “cloak” complete environments (even data centres) as well as other hybrid cloud environments utilised, such as public clouds (Amazon).
- The extraction point is secured – If anything/anyone has made their way within your infrastructure, stealth attaches to the response and disallows any extraction to exit and drops the packet.
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There are many other features to Stealth that could be mentioned too, however I am conscious of this article being read like an advert so I would advise you to go check the product out for yourself. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed!
An additional interesting point is that Unisys have developed a “Stealth AWS” product that quite literally cloaks the AWS infrastructure – making public clouds infinitely more secure than they are today. Other cloud provider versions are in the pipeline so we will see the product breaking out of the AWS Sphere.
[easy-tweet tweet=”With Stealth from Unisys you quite literally can’t hack what you can’t see” hashtags=”hack, infosec, security, cloud”]
With security being key for any cloud environment, the cost of bad security should never be undersold. With the average time of a hacker/cyber breach being 260 days before they execute, odds aren’t in your favour. In fact, you may already have intruders looking at your data. With this product line from Unisys you quite literally can’t hack what you can’t see.
Our advice is for you to take a look at Unisys Stealth and draw your own conclusions. Decide if you want an invisibility cloak placed around your data centre, public cloud and operational systems, personally, I’d be saying ‘Yes please!’.
Neil Cattermull, Director of Cloud Practice, Compare the Cloud
Neil's focus is on developing cloud technology and big data. You can often find him advising CXOs on cloud strategy.