Security policy management specialist AlgoSec announced that its Security Management solution now supports Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, enabling unified policy management across hybrid environments.
The Security Management solution manages complex network security policies throughout their lifecycle— from discovering application connectivity requirements, through ongoing change management and proactive risk analysis, to secure decommissioning.
“AlgoSec is focused on enabling enterprises to seamlessly manage their network security policy across heterogeneous cloud environments,” Nimmy Reichenberg, AlgoSec vice president of strategy, told eWEEK. “Microsoft Azure is a leader in the rapidly growing enterprise IaaS market so supporting Azure is at the heart of our strategy.”
Reichenberg explained that bringing security to the cloud game early is one of the stumbling blocks for businesses deploying a security management solution.
“Cloud deployment teams too often don’t include security, when security teams finally get involved they don’t have the visibility or the right processes to ensure security in the cloud,” he said. “Second, when it comes to network security, the cloud introduces a software-defined security architecture that is fundamentally different from that of physical networks.”
Reischenberg said security and operations teams must now learn to seamlessly manage cloud security controls alongside traditional on-premises firewalls in a way that ensures security and compliance, and delivers the connectivity requirements of business applications, wherever they reside.
The Security Management solution enables users deploying business applications on Azure to automatically discover and migrate application connectivity flows to Azure, and get full visibility across the enterprise environment in a single console, including traditional and next generation firewalls deployed on-premises and firewalls deployed on Azure.
The solution also allows businesses to fully automate change management processes, including hands-free policy push to firewalls deployed on Azure; automatically assess risk to detect unauthorized or risky firewall changes and inefficient or unnecessary policies, and instantly generate out-of-the-box regulatory compliance reports, such as PCI DSS, SOX, HIPAA, and others.
“Somewhat surprisingly, the number one reason enterprises are flocking to the cloud is not cost, it’s the agility and ease with which business applications can be deployed,” Reischenberg said. “This means that security processes, which have traditionally been manual and slow must also transform to operate at the speed of cloud.”
He noted security management has to evolve to support business transformation initiatives, such as cloud and SDN, which means security management processes will have to embrace automation.
“What cloud platforms do through their abstraction layers and APIs is essentially remove the human middleware from several IT functions,” he said. “Security will have to adopt the same mentality.”