Moving applications to the cloud requires agencies to refocus their security away from the network and onto users and data, according to experts who spoke at the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) Executive Leadership Conference on Oct. 30.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe network defense has already been stretched to the breaking point, and having these big internally soft, externally hard shell networks just does not work in this day and age,\u201d said U.S. Digital Service engineer Andy Brody. \u201cThe boundaries are less physical and more logical.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Brody explained that agencies don\u2019t yet have the \u201cbudget or the appetite\u201d to move everything to the cloud in one fell swoop, resulting in a network of applications that is split between new and old infrastructure. This split makes network perimeter-based defenses particularly hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe modern network, really what we\u2019re seeing with the introduction of cloud is a change in the landscape in terms of how we look at security,\u201d said Sara Mosley, Trusted Internet Connections lead for the Department of Homeland Security. \u201cYou still need the perimeter protections because everybody still has regular networks, traditional networks, but at the same time you really need to look at what it is you need to protect.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to Steve Kovac, vice president of global governments and compliance and Zscaler, data needs to be safe and accessible from almost any location because of the cloud and increasing popularity of remote access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not protecting the network, it\u2019s protecting the user \u2014 so that user has to have the same experience whether they\u2019re sitting in a Starbucks, or they\u2019re sitting on the battlefield. It\u2019s got to be the same experience,\u201d said Kovac. \u201cIf you put policy around the user, the network just becomes a form of transit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The cloud environment also blurs the line between public-facing and internal-facing access points, according to Brody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not solely serving either of these populations,\u201d he explained. \u201cAnd this means that the identities employees use to access that information require simplification.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou may be a government employee, but you\u2019re also a citizen, so that identity transcends both sides of that coin,\u201d said Jeff Frederick, senior solutions engineer at Yubico. \u201cAnd so, giving individuals one token to authenticate either business and government apps or their citizen-facing apps is going to be a much more cost-effective method than trying to provide multiple tokens for multiple individual roles.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to Mosley, these differences in cloud-based security require agencies to keep their security teams in on the discussion thorough the transition to cloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve got to really bring in the security folks from the beginning in terms of planning it because they have to understand how they will be monitoring,\u201d said Mosley. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to look at it from the protection of your network, you\u2019re going to look at it from the protection of your data.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agencies will also be left straddling new and old systems, as rules and resources prevent the largest networks from quick transition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA lot of the barriers are policy, a lot of the barriers are just investment in physical infrastructure and people and processes that are hard to change,\u201d said Brody. \u201cYou can\u2019t just take a giant enterprise network and say, \u2018OK, now we\u2019re in the cloud.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mosley added that in cloud transitions, small agencies will have the advantage of speed because they don\u2019t have as much to migrate, but will be at a disadvantage with security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere\u2019s definitely smaller agencies that are much more agile, they can kind of move faster, but from a skillset perspective I think there\u2019s some challenges there, so they\u2019re relying on a third-party or outsourced provider to provide that,\u201d Mosley said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Moving applications to the cloud requires agencies to refocus their security away from the network and onto users and data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":26403,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":10,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2869],"class_list":["post-14837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cyber"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"3YMYURHMD5BFTMUGDAKQTYS7JY","arc_canonical_url":"\/it-networks\/2017\/10\/30\/cloud-migrations-call-for-a-security-refocus\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n