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New Report: Pragmatic Security for Cloud and Hybrid Networks

Rich October 5, 2015 No Comments

This is one of those papers I’ve been wanting to write for a while. When I’m out working with clients, or teaching classes, we end up spending a ton of time on just how different networking is in the cloud, and how to manage it. On the surface we still see things like subnets and routing tables, but now everything is wired together in software, with layers of abstraction meant to look the same, but not really work the same. This paper covers the basics and even includes some sample diagrams for Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, although the bulk of the paper is cloud-agnostic.   From the report: Over the last few decades we have been refining our approach to network security. Find the boxes, find the wires connecting them, drop a few security boxes between them in the right spots, and move on. Sure, we continue to advance the state of the art in exactly what those security boxes do, and we constantly improve how we design networks and plug everything together, but overall change has been incremental. How we think about network security doesn’t change – just some of the particulars. Until you move to the cloud. While many of the fundamentals still apply, cloud computing releases us from the physical limitations of those boxes and wires by fully abstracting the network from the underlying resources. We move into entirely virtual networks, controlled by software and APIs, with very different rules. Things may look the same on the surface, but dig a little deeper and you quickly realize that network security for cloud computing requires a different mindset, different tools, and new fundamentals. Many of which change every time you switch cloud providers. Special thanks to Algosec for licensing the research. As usual everything was written completely independently using our Totally Transparent Research process. It’s only due to these licenses that we are able to give this research away for free. The landing page for the paper is here. Direct download: Pragmatic Security for Cloud and Hybrid Networks (pdf) Share:

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