In just the first half of 2020, data breaches exposed 36 billion records. And, as the web continues on the trend of explosive growth, there are constantly new security challenges on the horizon.
With vulnerabilities around every corner, effective and comprehensive security policies are more important than ever. The cycle of manually creating and maintaining security practices will not be able to scale to meet these needs. Automation is the way forward.
Regardless of your current journey with cloud, remember how on-prem looked?
You have various components that make up your world: Routers, switches, hosts … the list could go on. And each one of these has its own process to keep access tight and help control security. Each works separately to keep things, and people, who shouldn’t have access out as well as allowing the correct audience in. You’re all too familiar with that room (or rooms, even) full of equipment, each type with its own security setup and a team of people to configure access on routers, servers and the rest.
There are many problems with this age-old approach:
Organisations might find themselves with hundreds (or thousands) of people whose access they need to manage. In practice, it's nearly impossible to manage the entire ecosystem effectively if you’re using a manual approach.
There’s a temptation to see cloud as something that ‘just works’. While cloud is transformative and can provide tremendous cost benefits, it comes with its own set of complications. If you don’t understand that out of the gates, you might assume that all of your technical debt will be easily addressed. The reality is that you’re just swapping one set of tools, for another set of tools.
You’ll quickly find out that security is something that needs a lot of manual intervention to set up and maintain - even on the cloud.
It’s a typical experience to realise your security issues resurface after your move to the cloud. So, what does instinct tell you? Designate a group of people to manually maintain your cloud security. Just like you did on-prem.
And just as it happens on-prem, there are two big problems with a manual approach to cloud security:
Long term, a manual approach isn’t workable. You’ll never ‘rest easy’ knowing that you’re adequately addressing all of your security concerns because it rests on fallible human beings.
Solutions that mitigate the mistakes that are made through human error is the ultimate goal. This is where Appvia can help. By enabling companies to automate security best-practices, you don’t have to worry about calling people for different types of access and security needs.
And because it's automated, it is not labour intensive. You could have just one person looking after hundreds and hundreds of users, and sleep easy knowing that you’re operating in a well-architected security environment. With these things taken care of, your teams are free to focus on applications and delivering more business value to customers.
