Cloud Protection Moves Into a New Phase

It’s RSA Conference season and a great time to talk about containers and security.

No, not traditional shipping containers.

Containers have become developers’ preferred deployment model for modern cloud applications, helping organizations accelerate innovation and differentiate themselves in the marketplace. This is part of the natural progression of the datacenter, moving from the physical, on-premise servers of old, to virtual servers, and then to the public cloud.

According to a report released today by McAfee, “Navigating a Cloudy Sky,” containers have grown rapidly in popularity over the past few years, with 80 percent of those surveyed using or experimenting with them. However, only 66 percent of organizations have a strategy to apply security to containers, so there is still work to be done.

Realistically, most companies will have a mixed, or “hybrid cloud” solution for some time. A big challenge for customers is to maintain security and visibility as they migrate to the public cloud and adopt new technologies like containers.

As containers gain in popularity, getting visibility of their container workloads and understanding how security policies are applied is something that enterprises will need to assess to ensure workloads are secure in the cloud. In the shared security responsibility model laid out by cloud providers, enterprises can leverage the available native controls and the interconnectivity with production workloads and data stores, but will need to actively manage the security of those workloads. Gaining visibility, mitigating risk and protecting container workloads helps build a strong foundation for secure container initiatives.

McAfee is helping to fill the security need in this new environment by offering hybrid cloud security solutions to customers. For example, the release of McAfee Cloud Workload Security (CWS) v5.1 – announced today and available Q2 2018 – gives customers a tool that identifies and secures Docker containers, workloads and servers in both private and public cloud environments.

McAfee CSW 5.1 quarantines infected workloads and containers with a single click, thus reducing misconfiguration risk and increasing initial remediation efficiency by nearly 90 percent.

Previously, point solutions were needed to help secure containers. But with multiple technologies to control multiple environments, security management faced unnecessary complexities. McAfee CWS can span multi-cloud environments: private data centers using virtual VMware servers, workloads in AWS, and workloads in Azure, all from a single interface.

McAfee CWS identifies Docker containers within five minutes from their deployment and quickly secures them using micro and nano-segmentation, with a new interface and workflow. Other new features include discovery of Docker containers using Kubernetes, a popular open source platform used to manage containerized workloads and services, and enhanced threat monitoring and detection with AWS GuardDuty alerts – available directly within the CWS dashboard.

McAfee is the first company to provide a comprehensive cloud security solution that protect both data and workloads across the entire Software as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service spectrum.  So, when you’re talking containers, be sure to include McAfee in the conversation.

And don’t forget to stop by the McAfee booth, North Hall, #3801, if you’re attending RSA.

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Article Link: https://securingtomorrow.mcafee.com/business/cloud-security/cloud-protection-moves-new-phase/