Article Welcome to the Future of Cyber Security
By Grant Asplund / 17 Jun 2020 / Topics: Windows 10 Mobility Cloud
By Grant Asplund / 17 Jun 2020 / Topics: Windows 10 Mobility Cloud
This was precisely what my great-grandparents did. As a youngster in the 60’s-70’s, I have fond memories of going to my grandparents’ farm. At their peak, my grandparents would hand-gather more than 2,000 eggs a day.
Collecting the eggs by hand with wire baskets was just the beginning. Every egg needed to be hand-cleaned, weighed and sorted by size. Additionally, each egg had to be checked for any cracks in the shell and checked ‘inside’ the egg for any blood-spots. This meant holding the egg up to a box with a hole in front and a lightbulb inside. The box shields the egg-checkers’ eyes from the bright light and directs the light out the front hole. By holding the egg up to the light exiting the hole,the checker could see into the egg and look for any damages.
Seven days a week, my grandparents could be found in their basement, sitting in rocking chairs cleaning eggs with sandpaper blocks. Then they would blood-spot check them, weigh them, sort them by size and put them into the industrial-grade, walk-in refrigerator in their basement.
In essence, my grandparents were checking their assets for compliance violations – dirt and feces on the shells, cracks in the shells and blood-spots inside the egg. They wouldn’t be able to sell their eggs if any of these violations were found. Fortunately for them, they only had to perform each check once.
Even with only having to perform their compliance checks once - clean, check for cracks, blood spots, sort by size – it’s easy to see why my grandparents couldn’t scale. Sure, they could have hired additional help but there simply wasn’t enough profit in selling eggs to distributors without economies of scale.
However, for you, when using public cloud for your datacenter and workloads, the list of things you must do and confirm to ensure compliance with NIST, HIPPA, PCI and other regulations is far more comprehensive. It must be continuous; one check is not sufficient in the dynamic and constantly changing cloud. Moreover, the consequences of non-compliance can be far more devastating and more costly. It is simply impossible to do it all by hand and without the assistance of automation and technology.
Eventually, my grandparents went out of business because they couldn’t scale to compete with the automated poultry and egg industries. Today, automation and technology have replaced the manual processes they once completed by hand.
Similarly, as you work to simplify and scale your business’ move to the public cloud and you can now automate the secure configurations and continuous compliance of your workloads. With the right tools you can even find and automatically fix the compliance cracks in your cloud security posture.
Cloud Security Posture Management, that includes automated tools and vendor-provided frameworks, can make some of the challenges of cloud security easier by providing expert systems of automation and compliance frameworks to help you to be compliant in cloud environments. These cloud security solutions provide a bridge to ensure that security requirements are monitored in cloud technologies, including emerging serverless and containerized environments.
Microsoft also makes it easy to securely migrate from End of Support Windows Server® platforms to Azure, through Check Point. Utilizing today’s automation and compliance tools, with a cloud security blueprint and working with solutions partners like Insight, companies can improve their cloud confidence and protect against identity theft and data loss in the cloud.
Chief Cyber Security Evangelist, Check Point
For more than 20 years, Grant has been sharing his insights on how businesses can best protect themselves from sophisticated cyberattacks in an increasingly complex world. As Check Point’s chief evangelist he travels the world enthralling audiences with his passionate and relational storytelling at conferences like RSA and Next100 CIOs. Grant has a wide range of cybersecurity experience, having served in diverse roles ranging from sales, marketing, business development and senior management for Dome 9, Blue Coat Systems, Neustar and Altor Networks. As CEO of MetalInfo he led its acquisition by Neustar. Grant is also the host of the TalkingCloud podcast on cloud security.
