In a previous blog post, I discussed why the cloud is an important, growing, part of modern business and why enterprises should be considering cloud. In that article I talked about why securing your corporate cyber network during the journey to the cloud was vital. In this post, I want to address why cloud security needs to be maintained beyond the move, and the best tool to do so.

The cloud offers many benefits thanks to the scalability and flexibility it delivers. However, due to its digital nature, the cloud has significantly more access points and this means more entry-ways for those with malicious intent. Addressing security and compliance in the cloud requires a rigorous and continuous approach that ensures risks are identified and controlled with speed. This is a time-consuming process and discourages many businesses from using the cloud.

The cloud is a very different beast from on-premise data storage and requires a very different security model. Security teams can no longer depend on pre-deployment scanning, penetration tests or presence-based discovery methods. Due to the size of cloud and its many access points, wide visibility is required – and more visibility than a human team can provide. The solution is to embrace automation.

With automation you can more efficiently manage a wide spectrum and larger amounts of traffic that you would expect in a cloud-based system. Problems surrounding human error are also eradicated with automation.  And as long as automation is maintained by an IT team with knowledge of the solution, then the cloud will remain safe and secure. But, knowing which tool to use for cloud security is a difficult task for the uninitiated. This is where Evident is a powerful tool.

As a Palo Alto Cloud Specialization Partner, we offer a full range of cloud infrastructure services to help organisations take full advantage of the cloud. Most prominent of these solutions is Palo Alto Networks® Evident. Evident was developed specifically to help modern IT, DevOps and risk/compliance teams implement and maintain security within the cloud shared responsibility model. It provides the company security that utilises automation to provide continuous monitoring of its cloud environment. In addition, Evident checks the data stored within the company’s cloud storage for data exposure and malware.

• Many of the benefits offered by Evident include:
• Continuous visibility and monitoring;
• Compliance validation;
• Securing cloud storage services;
• Automated remediation;
• Frictionless approach to cloud security;