Business Case for Investment to Secure AWS Cloud Development Environments

You know your IaaS development spaces are increasingly beyond the reach of your security tools. Symantec Security for IaaS ticks all the right boxes: enforcing security and privacy policies but without frustrating your developers.

This 6-step business case builder gives you everything you need to construct a compelling argument for investing in Symantec Security for IaaS, including:

Proving why IaaS security risks demand to be taken seriously
Showing why you need more visibility of IaaS environments without adding more complexity
Demonstrating how Symantec Security for IaaS gains DevOps

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms are a great way for businesses to boost agility, reduce costs, and shift operational burdens. Especially when it comes to removing development bottlenecks and accelerating software releases.

But more and more IaaS development environments are operating beyond the reach of traditional corporate security tools. The result? If proper configuration and security policies aren’t enforced, these convenient IaaS instances could be exposing your business to major security and compliance risks. Plus, there’s the extra challenge of maintaining security when DevOps teams prize speed over privacy and protection.

Symantec can help. Use this 6-point business case builder to demonstrate why Symantec Security for IaaS gives you visibility, automation and control over IaaS environments, without frustrating or slowing down DevOps.

Show why the unstoppable rise of IaaS has implications for security

Organizations everywhere are taking advantage of IaaS, with the market expected to grow by over 27% in 20191. AWS owned over 34% of the IaaS market in 20182, and its dominance keeps growing: 68% of enterprises were estimated to use AWS in 2018, up from 59% in 20173.

The convenience of AWS and other IaaS services makes them extremely popular with developers, who can spin up a server environment and pay for it on a credit card in minutes. But just like any other aspect of your IT estate, you need to make sure you’re managing and mitigating the security risks associated with IaaS services. Especially as DevOps colleagues who spin up a server on the fly often bypass traditional security tools altogether.

Key takeaway: IaaS is an asset to our business and an increasingly valuable pillar of our IT infrastructure and development process. So we need to make sure we’ve thoroughly understood its security implications.

Prove why security risks associated with IaaS need to be taken seriously

Cloud instances that use or store sensitive data are often invisible to your business. Developers outnumber security professionals by 100 to 14, so monitoring how and where DevOps teams upload sensitive data to the cloud is unrealistic. And because DevOps are measured on speed rather than security, these teams are turning to IaaS providers’ native security tools and bypassing corporate security controls that inhibit their productivity, even though the business depends on these controls to enforce data privacy, governance and compliance.

More broadly, cloud security can be a grey area, with some businesses confident that a cloud provider like AWS owns every aspect of security on their platform. In fact, while providers secure access to the cloud, data within those environments is your responsibility. This includes configurations, OS updates, and compliance with any data privacy and governance regulations that apply to your business.

Key takeaway: Our business benefits from using IaaS, but we can’t ignore the serious security, privacy and compliance risks it’s creating.

Demonstrate why you need more visibility of IaaS environments without adding more complexity

If your existing security tools aren’t working, and you can no longer enforce effective security in the cloud, why not just add another security point solution? In fact, businesses have now purchased so many security products that they’re experiencing unacceptable blind spots, complexity and management overload.

You need an approach that provides the insight you need, while enforcing and automating security across DevOps and cloud, so you get:

Continuous assessment and assurance that you’re aligned to security, governance and compliance policies.
Visibility and control of individual development workloads in IaaS environments.
Robust protection from risks like malware, misconfiguration, cyber attacks and data loss.

Key takeaway: We need visibility and control over IaaS environments, but these capabilities should lighten the load on security operations – not add yet another discrete tool that requires integration and monitoring.

Recommend a solution: Symantec Security for IaaS

Symantec Security for IaaS combines market-leading Symantec services to reliably and efficiently solve the challenges we’ve just described – all-importantly without slowing down or frustrating your DevOps teams. The suite comprises:

Symantec CloudSOC CASB: for 360° visibility of who is using the cloud, and how.
Symantec Cloud Workload Assurance (CWA): continuous compliance validation for your cloud environment.
Symantec Cloud Workload Protection: automated discovery of cloud workloads and their security profiles, threat protection and real-time integrity monitoring, application control and isolation to block exploits, plus protection for cloud storage.

You can start by deploying any one of these services, or a combination, or add more services at any time. But what’s great about this approach is that you’ll be eliminating silos not increasing them, because each product builds the capabilities of your IaaS security suite, and advances your journey to an Integrated Cyber Defense platform.

Key takeaway: Symantec Security for IaaS ticks all the cloud security boxes we need, with automation for maximum efficiency and minimum management burden.

Show how Symantec Security for IaaS gains DevOps buy-in

Because it integrates into your development workflows in a way that doesn’t slow you down, Symantec Security for IaaS will be well-received by DevOps:

No need for DevOps to waste time assembling home-grown solutions using native IaaS providers’ security tools.
No complex remediations when these home-grown ‘solutions’ malfunction.
No risk of out-dated corporate security tools being bypassed altogether because they’re too restrictive.

Key takeaway: Implementing standardized security policies across our cloud development environments will promote a faster, more efficient and more secure development cycle.

Symantec Integrated Cyber Defense Platform: Organizations are increasingly rejecting the costs and risks of managing a disparate cyber security infrastructure. Open architectures like the Symantec Integrated Cyber Defense platform let you unify multiple security solutions and services to establish comprehensive and consolidated security protection spanning hybrid cloud, network, endpoint and threat protection.

Prove why Symantec is the best investment for your budget

The Symantec CloudSOC CASB offering has been named a Leader in the most recent Forrester Wave Report5 and Gartner Magic Quadrant for CASB6.
Symantec Cloud Workload Protection was named a winner in CRN’s Product of the year awards for cyber security7.
The Symantec Cloud Council, our internal cloud strategy group, works to establish best practices that are shared with customers to help continuously improve the quality and effectiveness of the protection we provide for cloud environments like AWS.

Key takeaway: We can choose these Symantec solutions with confidence. We can see there’s a security risk with IaaS, and that Symantec offers us a proven means to tackle it.

Source: Symantec