Key criteria for evaluating cloud cyber security solutions

first. Summary

Cloud network security solutions provide a suite of security services for single and multi-cloud environments to prevent unauthorized traffic, access, modification, misuse or exposure. These security services are managed through a central platform that can define and enforce security policies at a global level.

Cloud environments use a virtual network structure to route traffic through an organization’s infrastructure-as-a-service environment. Cloud cyber security solutions integrate with cloud platforms and virtualization solutions to deploy and orchestrate virtual security appliances that provide security visibility, control, and monitoring.

The flexibility of compute and storage services in a cloud environment also carries over to the networking aspect. New virtual network architectures such as virtual private clouds (VPCs) and virtual networks (VNets) can be scaled up and down on demand, making it difficult to continuously manage the security policies of these new environments. This is especially difficult when environments are delivered across multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments, and even more difficult when third-party cloud networking solutions can identify and Configure connections across multiple environments through a graphical user interface (GUI) or infrastructure as code (IaC).

Cloud cybersecurity solutions improve security—they are not intended to respond to incidents or help find threats. Their purpose is to provide visibility across network structures and enforce policies at the global, service, and user levels.

Cloud network security is not a security device. Rather, it is a central orchestration platform that can support visibility and control. The solution is cloud-aware and vendor agnostic, meaning it can be used across multiple vendors and managed from the same pane of glass. It can insert services such as firewalls and gateways into appropriate places in the network, but to do so, it must be able to coordinate functions, including root structures such as port forwarding. AWS, vendor-specific security capabilities, or third-party devices that customers can purchase. Finally, the solution can aggregate and forward relevant logs to the customer’s solution of choice, such as a security information and event management (SIEM) tool or security data lake .

This is GigaOm’s first year reporting on the cloud cyber security space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report details the capabilities (table stakes, key criteria, and emerging technologies) and non-functional requirements (evaluation metrics) for selecting an effective cloud network security solution. fruit. The accompanying GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel on those capabilities and metrics. Together, these reports provide an overview of the category and its underlying technologies, identify leading cloud cybersecurity offerings, and help decision makers evaluate these solutions so they can make more informed investment decisions.