How to Secure the Intangible Cloud Native Security in the New Age – DevOps.com

People dont want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

Companies arent interested in managing IT; theyre more interested in results. They want to deliver software quickly and focus on their core product or service. This is where the concept of cloud native computing comes inand why securing it has become critical.

Traditionally, companies had many servers and resources. Today were moving toward a simpler reality. Developers are focusing on whats needed to deploy business logic, regardless of what its deployed on. Thats why its particularly appealing to move to software without the server and the added complex management of IT overhead.

If a company can push its offerings without hardware, patch management, storage and so forth, and it can do it more affordably and faster, its a great win.

2012 was the golden age of IT, where admins ruled the world and developers got in line. Moving from that era to 2016, we come to the age of the cloud, where developers were kings.

For many years, the IT department ledand perhaps stifledinnovation within organizations. Developers paths for innovation were limited to the area which they had control, i.e., the application layer. Anything beyond that was the IT departments call. This included hosting, load balancing, database management and whether to adopt virtualization or advanced networking technologies.

With the emergence of NFV and cloud computing, that changed. There has been a continuous erosion of the abstraction layers that developers were faced with in the past. In 2020, developers are the masters of their own destiny, pushing their organization toward innovation. All of this is possible not only due to virtualization and cloud computing, but also to the relative simplicity of a developer setting up a full application stack on their own laptop.

In many organizations, the CTO focus has moved from an infrastructure orientation to an application focus. Developers are the new golden children of these organizations. They hold the keys to increasing company profits.

There are many numbers being thrown around about the efficiency of cloud native. Whether its 300% reduction in deployment time or a mere 30%, the reality is that the time savings are huge. Many developers will never see a traditional data center again in their lives. In fact, new applications are developed as microservices or at the very least as containers, simply because theyre faster.

Theres no going back. This new approach enables developers to invest in scalable solutions without making companies preallocate unnecessarily large sums of money. Both applications and infrastructure can scale up or down quickly, using the right amount of resources to provide the best service.

Businesses that are seasonal or peak-oriented gain a lot from the movement to cloud native architecture. Users also stand to gain from the move, as they receive the best service possible, without downtime. Everyone comes out on top.

This movement to broader use of cloud native architectures is a trend that will continue to grow over time.

By 2025, VMs and bare metal will be as anachronistic as mainframe and token ring networks are today. In fact, most medium-to-large organizations already have some kind of a migration project from VMs to containers in progress. Many developers dont need to spin up VMs anymore, since they can have a whole application stack running on their laptop using containers. When they are done, they simply lift and shift it to staging and production environments.

In addition, on-premises and cloud environments are becoming a single entity rather than two separate infrastructures. People used to think that the entire data center was going to move to managed clouds for economical reasons. Today, however, most deployments are becoming hybrid. Organizations are opting to keep some of their on-prem systems (mostly legacy applications that cannot be easily moved to the cloud). IT administrators are starting to think about the deployment in the cloud as an extension of the on-prem data center rather than a separate network that needs to be managed.

This trend will most likely continue, making it all the more important to understand the changing expectations around how to secure the hybrid network environment. The rate of change for cloud native environments is monumentally faster than on-prem, initiating code in milliseconds.

Most legacy solutions werent built to cope with ephemeral networks and compute entities that go up and down within seconds, one million times a day. So, whats the best way to future-proof risk management in this ever-changing environment? There is no singular answer, but in general prevailing advice suggests you consider the long view, exploring the options best suited for your approach and then look at each through a one, three and five year lens.

When thinking about the future of security, the basics stay the same and the threat modeling concepts stay the same. However, there are a number of security issues to consider, including policies, permissions and authorizations. As networks are converging, the security tools are as well. Looking forward, only solutions that can provide a genuine single pane of glass to control your digital estate will have a real impact on security.

When looking at solutions to help apply security to cloud native architectures, ask the following questions:

When implemented correctly, modern micro-segmentation techniques can offer a simple way to secure a cloud native environment, including solving the unique challenges of containers and providing the ability to create dynamic application policies down to process level. Look for tools that provide a single view and foundational visibility, automatically discovering all network flows and dependencies. This allows your business to take advantage of the best of serverless computing without increasing risk or complexity for security.

See the article here:

How to Secure the Intangible Cloud Native Security in the New Age - DevOps.com