Page 46 - Cyber Defense eMagazine - October 2017

1. NATIVE: Cybersecurity solutions must be native to the hybrid cloud data center
environments in which they live. They must be built from the ground up work
seamlessly across the entire heterogeneous space which includes everything
from hypervisors, containers, images, various cloud topologies to legacy bare
metal and even those old mainframes.

2. CONVERGED: Cybersecurity solutions must work in a converged fashion,
providing a single solution that is flexible and works across the entire
heterogeneous environment. In the hybrid cloud data center these solutions
must work across everything from hypervisors, containers, images, various cloud
topologies to legacy bare metal and even old mainframes. Converged solutions
provide solid gains while reducing complexity. A great example is micro-
segmentation within the data center workloads. There are many point solutions
out there which only solve segmentation within a particular portion of the
environment and do it poorly. Each cloud provider provides Layer 4
segmentation but these are only specific to their particular cloud and provide zero
process level visibility. The same can be said by a few vendors who do the same
for on premise workloads. In order to truly do micro-segmentation you need a
converged solution that works across all of your environments seamlessly,
provides visibility to allow you to accurately create policies and which reside at
the Layer 7 process level.

3. FLEXIBLE: Working within the Hybrid Cloud Data Center you must have multiple
options for deployments from low touch to high touch. This enables deployment
across the entire spectrum and provides room to grow. Flexibility also refers to
fitting any provisioning and management model used by the DevOps teams. For
example, when dealing within these environments you may or may not be able to
deploy agents, therefore, your solution should offer both agent-based and
agentless options. When dealing with agents, ones which are truly lightweight,
easily provisioned by any provisioning mechanism deployed by DevOps staff
(Chef, Puppet, Ansible, etc.) and requires zero reboots, are considered
preferable and DevOp friendly.

4. VISIBILITY: By far the most important thing you need is visibility within the data
center. Visibility must be at process level and into the application workflows,
supplemented with rich contextual data from the various platforms, and
orchestrations from which they came. With this rich visibility, you have enough
context to create global, macro and micro segmentation policies easily and
quickly, and have the ability to find compliance issues. Most importantly, when it
comes to attackers, you can see their movements and even redirect them
dynamically into secure spaces where you can securely remove them from the

46 Cyber Defense eMagazine – October 2017 Edition
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