Speaking of Security – The RSA Blog and Podcast

Proving that physical and virtual infrastructure of the cloud can be trusted can be prohibitively difficult, especially when it comes to cloud services from external service providers. Verifying secure conditions in the foundations of the cloud is important for a simple reason: If organizations can’t trust the safety of their computing infrastructure, the security of all the information, applications and services running on top of that falls into doubt.

In my job, I get to think a lot about where things are going. I’m hearing day in and day out that security is a major stumbling block to fully virtualizing a datacenter and also for “cloud”. In the case of the virtualized datacenter, what many call Private Cloud, this stumble usually happens when the security guy is brought in after the ball is already in motion and promptly puts a stop to things “until it’s secure”.

On a recent trip to China, me and an RSA colleague couldn’t help but observe how the Forbidden City was a like an exercise in defense in depth. We had to traverse protection after protection to move from one area to the next, like firewalls insulating DMZs from the public web, isolated in turn from application servers, themselves isolated from database resources, perhaps even air-gapped from other environments such as production control systems.

What I love about security is the fact that security should always be based around a discussion. Security is NOT about products. Security is about implementation and how it is implemented.

EMC conducted a survey of U.S. Federal Government IT Security stakeholders recently, and one of the results that struck me was one around cloud adoption. We usually hear about security being an impediment to the wide-scale adoption of cloud and virtualization technologies, but our survey revealed another interesting barrier.

In case you missed it last week, VMware announced their latest version of vShield App with Data Security, which has RSA’s DLP technology embedded to help discover and classify sensitive data in virtual machines. One of the key points here is that data discovery and classification capabilities are now built-in to the virtual infrastructure, making the virtual infrastructure content-aware for the first time. So you may ask, what’s the big deal about being built-in instead of bolted-on?

EMC and VMware recently announced that RSA Data Loss Prevention will be integrated into the newest version of VMware vShield in Q3 of this year. RSA issued a press release about it titled: RSA and VMware Partner to Deliver DLP Technology for VMware vShield 5. This is a very important announcement, representing not just a valuable integration of technologies but a new vision for securing sensitive information.

More and more organizations are deciding to “go virtual.” And why not? The benefits are numerous–optimized resources, increased efficiency and a more dynamic infrastructure, among other things. IT departments around the world are collectively champing at the bit to deliver a centralized, optimally partitioned, easily scaled (yet physically small) data center. Shutter those football-field-sized data centers and open the door to a minimalist IT operations center. Sounds perfect right?

Some good folks and I wrote a security brief detailing strategies for effectively evolving security operations in the face of escalating APTs. Rather than just put it out there, I thought it would be worth diving into why SOCS need to be more intelligent!

Any discipline when sufficiently advanced will exhibit many of the same traits, building as Art Coviello mentioned on Tuesday in his keynote, on the shoulders of giants. The painful work of building wisdom, learning to work together and establishing procedures for what once seemed impossible can eventually make miracles commonplace.