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Many modern organizations are migrating their infrastructure and systems to the cloud. AWS, like other cloud providers, has a Shared Responsibility Model that determines which cloud components AWS is responsible for securing and which are the customers responsibility to secure. Lets take a look at what this model means, its many challenges and how organizations can better protect their cloud infrastructure and improve their cloud security posture.

The AWS Shared Responsibility Model is a framework by AWS that determines which cloud architecture components Amazon, as the CSP (Cloud Service Provider), is responsible for securing, and which are the customers responsibility to secure. As a rule of thumb, AWS is responsible for security of the cloud, and the customer is responsible for security in the cloud.

Breaking that down, AWS is responsible for the host operating system, the virtualization layer and the physical security of the cloud servers. The customer is responsible for protecting the rest which is not a trivial amount of security ownership including network controls, configurations, IAM and customer data.

AWS Shared Responsibility Model [Source: AWS]

While structured and seemingly self-evident (i.e. everyone knows what is theirs to do security-wise), the shared responsibility model with AWS comes with considerable challenges.

First and foremost, many cloud customers do not understand the model or are even aware it exists. Some cloud customers may have the false sense that the CSP takes care of cloud security as part of the services and tools it provides. Others are not sure about the division of responsibility, i.e. the scope of their responsibility vs. that of the CSP. And there are gray areas, such as how to handle networking security given that both parties share responsibility for it.

In a recent IDC survey commissioned by Ermetic, a senior security decision maker noted that clarity regarding system security responsibility with cloud vendors and support is a big concern.

Contributing to the lack of clarity is that the level of security responsibility differs according to the kind of cloud service acquired: IaaS and PaaS require more security ownership by the customer whereas SaaS requires the customer to do almost nothing.

In a recent podcast, AWS security consultant Scott Piper notes that shared responsibility is a misnomer and should more accurately be called split responsibility. Piper points out that the model has no sharing or collaborative aspect just the responsibilities of the provider and the responsibilities of the customer, with no watchful eye by the provider ensuring that security problems or gaps arent created.

To complicate things further, each public cloud provider has its own shared responsibility model. The same area that one CSP designates the providers responsibility, another CSP may designate the customers responsibility or that of both. In the case of IaaS, broadly speaking, securing the physical aspects of infrastructure control falls to the CSP and securing the configuration and inner workings of the provisioned cloud resources falls to the customer.

Digital transformation accelerated by COVID-19 has caused many organizations to expand their move to the cloud. However, with this transformation so relatively new, these organizations internal company knowledge of managing and maintaining cloud infrastructure is still being developed. As a result, many such companies lack the expertise and bandwidth to identify, understand and solve the challenges of cloud security and shared responsibility.

For example, the IDC survey found that 50% of companies did not succeed in implementing the principle of least privilege a pillar of cloud security. They are failing at this important strategic initiative due to the difficulty and time it takes, lack of personnel or expertise, and multi-cloud difficulties.

Another reason the AWS shared responsibility model is challenging is the lack of tools available for consumers to secure the areas of shared responsibility that they own. According to Latch, an enterprise SaaS innovator in the building sector, Its a real challenge to find cloud-native security solutions that really work.

In addition, AWS does provide a growing array of security tools, such as for granting and controlling permissions IAM Policy Simulator and AWS Access Analyzer to name a couple. While these native tools do not answer all modern cloud security needs or even fully cover the customers shared responsibilities, customers may think they do. Also, native tools require much labor and expertise, so organizations may not be using them to the fullest. In fact, it happens that many organizations that implemented commercial and free of charge CSP tools were breached, and had sensitive data compromised.

The recent introduction of cloud security to organizations has also raised new questions about cloud security ownership within an organization. While security was traditionally the hands-down responsibility of IT or dedicated security teams, today, multiple divisions, departments and/or roles are involved.

The same survey found that the professional roles involved in cloud infrastructure security are diverse, and can include IT/Operations, DevOps, Cloud Security, Development/Engineering and IAM Security. According to the study, this diversity of security ownership within the organization results in fragmented decision making, siloed security practices and difficulties in implementing security across the board. These internal realities, together with the complications of a shared responsibility model, may inhibit or at the very least complicate implementation of proper cloud security practices.

Many organizations today are meeting their needs by deploying multiple cloud environments: AWS, GCP, Azure and others. Native security tools are cloud specific by nature, are at different levels of maturity and do not cover multi cloud use cases. In the above mentioned podcast, Piper recognizes the challenges in using the same solutions for multiple clouds and the difficulty in gaining an aggregated, consistent view across all the clouds in use.

These challenges create an acute need for unified multi cloud solutions that can see deeply into each public cloud and help address each clouds shared responsibility requirements.

Due to these challenges, many organizations are not properly handling their share in the security of their cloud infrastructure. This lack of adequately securing what falls to them to secure, including network controls, configurations, IAM and customer data, puts the organization at considerable risk of having identities and their entitlements exploited, and sensitive data compromised upon a cloud data breach.

The risk is not theoretical. According to the IDC survey, 98%(!) of organizations suffered a cloud data breach in the last 18 months. Getting breached is almost a given in todays hyper-hacked cloud world. More importantly, 63% of organizations had sensitive data exposed in the cloud and that number ballooned to 85% for companies with large cloud footprints. This means that these organizations were not correctly identifying and mitigating the risks of access to their sensitive data. These failings can have significant business implications and penalties in the long-run.

Why was their sensitive data exposed? The same survey found that 71% were using their cloud providers commercial security tools and 68% were using their providers free tools. This heavy reliance on cloud provider tools brings us back to confusion around shared responsibility. Organizations are possibly unclear about the capabilities of these tools for ensuring cloud infrastructure protection or are not putting in place the appropriate solutions to carry out their shared part in the fray or both.

Cloud security tools in use or planned for use by organizations [IDC State of Cloud Security 2021]

Half the battle is understanding your organizations shared (or split) security responsibilities. The other half is effectively addressing them. Relying on native tools alone to cover your cloud infrastructure security responsibilities is not enough. Failing to implement more substantial solutions can lead to serious data compromise and business impact.

So where do you start? Find an identity focused solution that tackles the leading risk to cloud infrastructure permissions to reduce your cloud attack surface at scale and address compliance. Gain a complete view into your cloud assets so you can assess and report on risk, with step by step remediation. Later, bring least privilege automation to engineering, preventing risk from the get-go.

The post The AWS Shared Responsibility Model: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on Ermetic.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Ermetic authored by Ermetic Team. Read the original post at: https://ermetic.com/whats-new/blog/aws/the-aws-shared-responsibility-model-everything-you-need-to-know/

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The AWS Shared Responsibility Model: Everything You Need to Know - Security Boulevard

Embracing new technologies lead to qualitative growth but simultaneously holds high chances of quantitative data breaches. While adopting cloud technology, it is important to see the security of cloud infrastructure as one of the crucial responsibilities. There are various organizations out there that are still unsure of the security of their data present in the cloud environment.

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In 2019, Collection #1, a massive data breach held responsible for compromising data set of over 770 million unique email addresses and 21 million unique passwords. The collection of data files was stored on a cloud storage service and MEGA. Similarly, information of over 108 million bets records was leaked by an online casino group. The leaked data included details of customers personal information along with deposits and withdrawals.

Then the same year, a famous food delivery service providing firm was breached, compromising the data of 4.9 million users, including consumers and delivery employees.

Additionally, a post from Security Boulevard says acording to a survey almost 98% of the companies had witnessed at least one cloud data breach in the past 18 months, that is compared to 79% in 2020.

These infamous data breaches are proof that storage service providers like the cloud requires consistent security management. Unfortunately, when we talk about cloud infrastructure security, many enterprises wrongly assume that their data is well guarded and is far away from the radar of cyber criminals. The truth is, these cyber criminals are experts at scraping up the exposed, vulnerable data by using unethical ways to look for unsecured databases.

For starters, the term cloud computing infrastructure security refers to the entire infrastructure, which involves a comprehensive set of policies, applications, and technologies. It also includes controls that are used to protect virtualized IP, services, applications, and data.

With companies migrating their extensive data and infrastructure to the cloud, the importance of cloud security testing becomes paramount. Cloud security offers multiple levels of control to provide continuity and protection in a network infrastructure. As a result, it is a highly essential element in creating a resilient environment that works for companies worldwide.

Enjoy the benefits of cloud infrastructure security by partnering with leading technology-based private cloud computing security service providers to keep the companys security smooth running.

Nowadays, cloud computing servers are becoming susceptible to data breaches. Cloud infrastructure security solutions help in ensuring that data like sensitive information and transaction is protected. It also helps in preventing the third party from tampering with the data being transmitted.

Distributed denial of service, aka DDoS attacks, is infamously rising and deployed to flood the computer system with requests. As a result, the website slows down to load to a level where it starts crashing when the number of requests exceeds the limit of handling. Cloud computing security provides solutions that focus on stopping bulk traffic that targets the companys cloud servers.

When it comes to the best practices of cloud infrastructure security solutions, it offers consistent support and high availability to support the companys assets. In addition, users get to enjoy the benefit of 27/7 live monitoring all year-round. This live monitoring and constant support offer to secure data effortlessly.

Infrastructure security in the cloud offers advanced threat detection strategies such as endpoint scanning techniques for threats at the device level. The endpoint scanning enhances the security of devices that are accessing your network.

In order to protect data, the entire infrastructure requires to be working under complaint regulations. Complaint secured cloud computing infrastructure helps in maintaining and managing the safety features of the cloud storage.

The points mentioned above are clear enough to state how beneficial and vital is cloud infrastructure security for an organization. Unfortunately, there are very many high-profile cases that have been witnessed in past years relating to data breaches.

To patch the loopholes and strengthen the IT infrastructure security, it is crucial to keep the security of cloud storage services a high priority. Engage with the top-class cloud computing security tools to get better results and have the data secured.

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The post Top 5 Benefits of Cloud Infrastructure Security appeared first on Kratikal Blogs.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Kratikal Blogs authored by Pallavi Dutta. Read the original post at: https://www.kratikal.com/blog/top-5-benefits-of-cloud-infrastructure-security/

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Top 5 Benefits of Cloud Infrastructure Security - Security Boulevard

Behind Atoss deal announced last week to acquire HPC-cloud specialist Nimbix are ramped-up plans to penetrate the U.S. HPC market and global expansion of its HPC cloud capabilities. Nimbix will become an Atos HPC cloud center of competency and act as a global hub and also be able to position Atos hardware for sale. Financial details of the acquisition were not yet disclosed.

Atos, of course, is a leading systems maker in Europe. It has worked with Nimbix in recent years including occasionally on joint proposals to customers. Nimbix began in 2010 as a boutique HPC cloud company offering leading-edge HPC technology, often much earlier than the big cloud providers. It has been winding down its independent cloud business and migrating customers to public clouds while leveraging its HPC orchestration services and Nimbix JARVICE XE software. Andrew Grant, Atos vice president for HPC strategic projects, discussed deal drivers and plans for Nimbix with HPCwire.

Grant singled out three deal drivers:

The product jewel in the deal is the Nimbix JARVICE XE software platform, which has been positioned as the first container-native hybrid cloud platform. It supports x86, OpenPower and Arm. There has even been work with Riken to port it to Fugaku, currently the top performer on the Top500 list.

In late 2020, Nimbix Chief Technology Officer Leo Reiter told HPCwire that JARVICE XE can be used with any Arm platform, so long as it supports Linux and Kubernetes. Currently, JARVICE XE is deployed on Fujitsu FX700 systems (which like Fugaku are powered by the Fujitsu A64FX CPU), and JARVICE also supports Amazons Graviton processors, either as a fully standalone resource or as a processing target from an existing JARVICE-based system.

In distinguishing the Atos and Nimbix cloud platform, Grant said, Atos is focused very much on the front end of the portal interface to make the job submission portal, easy and customer friendly, and the security around that. The JARVICE focus is very much downstream and what happens at the delivery end. So the ability to move containers, and to do it in a multi-cloud way. So you could go to Amazon, Google, etc. and have the ability to dynamically create clusters. Any Kubernetes target is suitable for JARVICE.

So, whereas we can easily submit a Slurm job, lets say from an on-prem system into GCP (Google Cloud Platform), what we couldnt easily do before was be able to create a cluster on the fly, submit those containers, have those containers elastically grow in the cloud environment. That is the unique IP that JARVICE has, which I think is a fantastic asset. I dont think anybody else has that capability, he said.

Atos has broadly identified four uses cloud cases (slide below) and is working with the major hyperscalers on them.

Use case one is where youve got a customer who has an on-prem facility and just wants to burst parts of their workload into the hyperscaler. That might be to access a new bit of hardware, or it might be just theyve run out of capacity on site. Use case two is the same but the customer doesnt have an on-prem facility. These are the easy ones that we could do today that we could do without the JARVICE software, although JARVICE makes it a lot easier. Use case three would be where we have a customer that perhaps has a very specific requirement, and wants to host a platform with a regional extension of a cloud service provider. We do this today, for SAP HANA for Oracle, where, for example, we have bare metal servers in Googles datacenters for any customer thats wanting to do Oracle as a service, he said.

The fourth use case, as described by Grant, is multi-tenanted HPC system such as a supercomputer hosted at a service provider, where we can partition off parts of the machine in an elastic way and scale them up. And Im distinguishing here, between partitioning a supercomputer and providing access on a general-purpose cloud system where youve got virtualized resources.

Nimbix was known for bringing advanced HPC technology to market early think FPGAs, GPUs, IBMs Power processor, Arm and Grant said Atos is likewise inclined and will continue in that vein. One wonders, for example, if it will be an early supporter of RISC-V in the cloud.

Grant said, Were doing some hardware evaluations on various things at the moment. Its a bit too early to talk about, but Atos is generally very early to market. We were the first to market with AMD Rome, for example, and similarly we will be very early with Sapphire Rapids and some of these other technologies that are coming out on the horizon.

Its early days and Grant expects the integration of Nimbix and the roll-out of expanded cloud offerings to occur over the next year. For the moment the Nimbix executive team has taken on new titles. Steve Hebert, founder and Nimbix CEO, is now VP, Global Head of Atos Nimbix HPC Cloud. Rob Sherrard, also a Nimbix cofounder, is now Sr. Director of Global Delivery for Nimbix HPC Cloud Services. Reiter, Nimbix CTO is now CTO and Technical Director of the Atos Nimbix HPC Cloud. It certainly would not be unusual for executive movement following acquisitions.

Atos has big plans.

Weve grown consistently 20 percent year on year. And thats mainly been in Europe, but weve also done a lot in India and South America, and so on. But as I said, we havent done an awful lot in the U.S., and as you know, 46 percent of the global market is in the U.S. The key thing is Atos is a big company in the U.S. We were a $3 billion company in 2019 Im not sure what the 2020 numbers were with over 10,000 employees and 45 different locations, said Grant.

Critically, for me anyway, are things like eight out of the 10 largest [U.S.] manufacturers are customers, 50 percent of the top banks are our customers. Those organizations are using HPC, but theyre not using HPC from at us today, for the reasons Ive mentioned. A key part of what we want to do is take advantage of that footprint, those customers, and have an expanded Nimbix team able to go and support those and upsell and cross-sell HPC capabilities into those customers. We absolutely intend to grow general HPC footprint hardware as well as software as well as cloud in the US through this acquisition.

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Digging into the Atos-Nimbix Deal: Big US HPC and Global Cloud Aspirations. Look out HPE? - HPCwire

Even in a world dominated by digital technologies, some companies still hesitate to adopt tools that could take their business to the next level. Thats often preventing businesses from engaging in developing customer trends, most of which increasingly rely on digital technologies to leverage.

Smart Business spoke with Jim Altman, Middle Market Pennsylvania Regional Executive at Huntington Bank, about some burgeoning digital trends, as well as strategies to take advantage of them.

What digital transformation trends are taking hold?

Companies today are using personalization to differentiate customer experiences. The experiences customers want differ based on who they are and what they need. With greater personalization and customization, companies can segment their approach so that narrower customer segments get catered products, experiences and services.

Unlocking the collected customer data companies hold goes a long way to understanding the uniqueness that a business can provide its customers. Every company collects a great deal of customer data, but many dont use that data to drive experiences. Its important that companies learn to analyze the data that they capture, in part so they can drive more personalized experiences.

Another trend has companies creating ecosystems that serve as a platform for broader interaction, either between a company and its customers, or with customers and other companies. Companies are starting to figure out who they need to partner with often because those partners work outside the companys first line of expertise to provide value to their customers, in part by offering multiple services in one place.

Why might businesses hesitate to adopt newer technologies?

Often business leaders, when presented with a new technology, arent eager to employ it. They may understand that the tool offers a more efficient way to perform a task, but they resist, instead relying on the way theyve always done it because, in their mind, its easier.

Additionally, as more applications are based in the cloud, some companies avoid using them because they are uncomfortable relying on cloud services. Thats typically out of concern for security, as some companies believe the cloud is not as secure as software hosted on on-premise servers. While this might seem to them like a prudent risk mitigation strategy, it often means the company misses out on opportunities to save costs through increased efficiencies, or to better connect with customers.

Overcoming that requires educating leadership about the pros and cons of cloud-based applications, making communication key. It takes working with someone who is able to explain the applications, how they work, and how to establish procedures that mitigate as much risk as possible.

Once the benefits and risks are clearly communicated, businesses should start small. For instance, use one cloud application to begin with and work into more as the organization gets more comfortable. Companies tend to think they need to move all applications to the cloud at once. But starting small can help the initiative gain credibility at all levels of the business, which instills confidence and helps the organization move to the next stage. The process can begin by creating a transition plan that identifies specific applications to move to the cloud one at a time. Once most people are comfortable, it can really take off from there.

How can companies mitigate technology risks?

A lot of risk can be mitigated by working with external partners. For example, there are a lot of fintechs that have created niche businesses that can help companies in very specific areas. For companies facing a risk thats outside their comfort zone, partnering with one of these up-and-coming companies that have mastered a specific functionality where that risk is found can help mitigate security concerns while connecting with valuable expertise.

Look for ways to partner with entities that have expertise and have already assumed certain risks. There are so many businesses that specialize in certain areas that companies often dont need to develop products, software or procedures internally because specialized partners can do it quicker and with less risk.

Insights Banking & Finance is brought to you by Huntington Bank

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Customer trends require technology to leverage - Smart Business Network

Tensor is the first system-on-chip (SoC) designed by Google, which will make its first appearance in the companys next-generation Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro flagship smartphones set to release later this year.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted in a statement to Engadget that Tensor has been four years in the making and builds off of two decades of Googles computing experience. The company also says its newcomputational processing for video feature debuting in upcoming Pixel 6 phones was only possible with its own mobile processor .

Tensor is an obvious nod to the companys open-source platform for machine learning, TensorFlow. The chip is powerful enough to run multiple AI-intensive tasks simultaneously without a phone overheating, or apply computational processing to videos as theyre being captured.

The company isnt giving away all the details about the processor yet, nor is it sharing specific information about its latest flagships now. But theres a lot of new stuff here, and we wanted to make sure people had context, Rick Osterloh said. We think its a really big change, so thats why we want to start early.

You can learn more about the development ofGoogles new Tensor mobile processor at the source page.

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Here's What We Know About Google's Tensor Mobile Chip So Far - iPhone in Canada