Simplifying and Securing Hybrid Clouds

GovLoop | October 26, 2021

President Joe Biden’s executive order (EO) on cybersecurity suggests the cloud will play a pivotal role in the federal government’s future; it urges agencies to maximize the technology’s flexibility and scalability rapidly and securely.

But what can happen if agencies embrace the cloud too rapidly? The answer is haphazard and insecure IT environments. These environments often occur when agencies combine on-premises and cloud-based IT in a hybrid model.

Finding the Right Approach to Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

Dark Reading | October 29, 2021

New strategies are surfacing to respond to new problems. Dr. Mike Lloyd, RedSeal’s CTO, reviews one of the latest: CSPM.

Cloud security is maturing — it has to. We’ve had too many face-palm-worthy incidents of organizations hearing “hey, I found your data in a world readable S3 bucket” or finding a supposedly “test” server exposed that had production data in it. Happily, we are emerging out of the Wild West phase, and some order and maturity is emerging, and along with it, new lingo.

How to Mitigate Security Risks in the the Cloud

CloudTweaks | August 3, 2021

Enterprises continue to spend billions annually on security technology, yet cyber breaches continue to come fast and furious. So what exactly is going on here? Why are the odds stacked against the good guys?

It turns out there are some pretty good reasons why security remains so elusive. Many organizations simply don’t have the staffing resources to do battle with a heavily automated enemy.

Behind the Firewall: 5 security leaders share incident response plans

Cybersecurity Dive | July 30, 2021

First, it’s good you have a plan to begin with. But have you tested it?

That is, have you gathered all your stakeholders, from the C-suite to the trenches, and run through your plan? And testing it once is not good enough. Your teams and networks are constantly changing, so your plan should evolve as well with time.

When an incident occurs, that is not the time to find out if your plan works. Testing turns up simple things, like having the ability to use outside communication mechanisms. If your system gets locked down by ransomware there is a good chance your address book in Outlook will be inaccessible.

Part of testing is also getting to know your network by modeling it and examining how it’s all connected. Having a continuously updated model of your network greatly speeds up your response time.

DOD’s Forecast Post-JEDI: Multi-Cloud with a Chance of Peril

NexGov | July 20, 2021

The Pentagon’s abandonment of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, contract was an anticlimactic demise for the once visionary single-cloud network.

…the protracted legal battle pushed JEDI past viability. While the cloud titans fought for their slice of the pie, other actors within the federal government, most significantly the intelligence community, transitioned to a multi-cloud network. As a result, the decision to retire JEDI is best seen as an inevitable step toward DOD’s multi-vendor destiny.

Dr. Mike Lloyd Named a Gold Globee Chief Technology Officer of the Year

IT World Awards | June 15, 2021

RedSeal’s Chief Technology Officer Dr. Mike Lloyd was named a Gold Globee winner for Chief Technology Officer of the Year, Security Hybrid in the 16th Annual 2021 IT World Awards honoring achievements and recognitions in the information technology and cyber security industries worldwide.

More than 65 judges from around the world representing a wide spectrum of industry experts participated in the judging process. The IT World Awards are open to all Information Technology and Cyber Security organizations from all over the world and their end-users of products and services.

 

Security Think Tank: Printer risks go deep into IT history

Computer Weekly | June 9, 2021

Though rarely discussed in a cyber context, the prevalence of connected printers and MFPs does pose security risks both technological and physical. What does a print security strategy need to take into account?

…This east-west traffic in local areas is the bane of the security professional. It makes the network harder to manage as it sprawls outwards, often in the uncontrolled IT equivalent of a shanty town. This, in turn, created the ecosystem in which security threats evolved, moving from viruses spread by floppy disks to those that spread directly over the network, and their descendants we see to this day, such as ransomware spreaders that can take over oil pipelines.

EO Gives Momentum to Federal Cloud Movement

Communications Daily | May 27, 2021

President Joe Biden’s cybersecurity executive order will boost the federal government’s reliance on cloud services and information sharing, experts told us. The EO directs federal civilian agencies to “accelerate movement to secure cloud services,” including software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).

“That’s really the best way for the government” to secure data, said RedSeal Federal Chief Technology Officer Wayne Lloyd. He expects the EO to drag agencies “kicking and screaming” into the cloud: “It’s something that’s long overdue,” from which the commercial sector has long seen the benefits.

Seven Cybersecurity Lessons the Coronavirus Can Teach the Armed Forces (and Us All)

Cyber Defense Review | May 21, 2021

If we have learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that very bad things can happen very quickly, especially if we are not sufficiently prepared. It turns out that everything we have been told about the pandemic is also relevant for cybersecurity; as such, the pandemic is an exceptional learning tool for cyber professionals.

Cyberattacks are like biological viruses in several ways: they can spread incredibly fast, their consequences can wreak huge economic damage, and the destruction they cause can be very difficult from which to recover. Viruses spread through human social networks and cyber-attacks exploit our online networks of trust.

AI, cyber terrain analytics improve hybrid multicloud security

VenturebBeat | May 21, 2021

Typical hybrid cloud IT integration strategies have fundamental design flaws that CIOs and CISOs need to address if they’re going to avert another attack on the scale of SolarWinds.

…any network mapping platform needs to excel at visualization and provide insightful analysis at a graphical level to identify potential security anomalies and actual breach activity. Useful in understanding this is the following example of how RedSeal’s cyber risk modeling software for hybrid cloud environments works.