Cloud Security Alliance Releases New Software Defined Perimeter for Infrastructure-as-a-Service Research

New Report Outlines How SDP Can Be Applied to Infrastructure-as-a-Service Environments, Including Requirements, Benefits and Key Use Cases

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – February 13, 2017 – RSA Conference 2017 - The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment, today announced the release of new research on Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The new report, created by the CSA’s Software Defined Perimeter Working Group, provides a clear sense of the security challenges facing IaaS enterprise users, outlines the problems that arise from combining native IaaS access controls with traditional network security tools, and demonstrates how SDP can solve these problems across various use cases.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service has different user access and security requirements than traditional on-premises systems, and these requirements cannot be fully satisfied with either traditional security tools or the security constructs provided by IaaS vendors. With an SDP architecture, organizations can securely provide user access to their IaaS resources without impeding business user or IT productivity. SDP allows organizations to have a centralized and policy-driven network security platform that covers their entire infrastructure and their entire user population.

“IaaS Security is a shared responsibility that requires a more advanced approach than traditional on-premises systems,” said Jason Garbis, leader of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service research team, and Vice President of Products for Cryptzone. “When SDP is properly deployed, it can be a catalyst for changing how network security is accomplished across the entire enterprise, for both on-premises and cloud. We’ve seen numerous organizations worldwide use SDP to increase their security stance, reduce the attack surface, increase business and IT staff productivity, and reduce compliance burdens, all while cutting costs.”

The new research covers the following use cases:

• Secure Access by Developers into IaaS Environment
• Secure Business User Access to Internal Corporate Application Services
• Secure Admin Access To Public Facing Services
• Updating User Access When New Server Instances Are Created
• Hardware Management Plane Access for Service Providers
• Controlling Access Across Multiple Enterprise Accounts

“Through our research, we’ve seen how and why traditional approaches to network security are lacking some effectiveness and efficiency for IaaS environments,” said Bob Flores, SDP Working Group Co-Chair. “The new research from the CSA SDP working group explains how an SDP architecture can improve security, compliance, and operational efficiency when applied to IaaS environments. SDP can also be beneficial in hybrid environments, including both traditional on-premise environments and virtualized environments.”

To obtain a full copy of the research report please visit: https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/download/sdp-for-iaas/.

About Cloud Security Alliance

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment. CSA harnesses the subject matter expertise of industry practitioners, associations, governments, and its corporate and individual members to offer cloud security-specific research, education, certification, events and products. CSA’s activities, knowledge and extensive network benefit the entire community impacted by cloud — from providers and customers, to governments, entrepreneurs and the assurance industry — and provide a forum through which diverse parties can work together to create and maintain a trusted cloud ecosystem. For further information, visit us at www.cloudsecurityalliance.org, and follow us on Twitter @cloudsa.

Media Contact

Kari Walker for the CSA
ZAG Communications
703.928.9996
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