Cloud security insights, thoughts, and ideas
At Threat Stack, we are all about keeping you secure as you scale your business and your infrastructure. That’s why we have added the ability to use AWS EC2 tags to organize and manage the deployment of Threat Stack IDS and FIM rules in your infrastructure. Read more “Introducing AWS EC2 Tag Integration”
All types of organizations are embracing DevOps as a way to deliver work quickly and reliably. However, security sometimes falls by the wayside in favor of the desire to move fast. In fact, a recent Threat Stack survey shows that 52% of companies admit to sacrificing security for speed.
As a result, Security, Development, and Operations teams often remain deeply siloed, causing security to be treated as an afterthought and placing teams in constant “reactive mode” — which exposes the organization to unnecessary risk. Our recent survey of Development, Operations, and Security professionals spells out a few of the key issues:
Ultimately, people and processes make up the foundation of every business transformation. SecOps is no different. Change can be difficult, but operationalizing cloud infrastructure security can help you reduce security incidents, ensure compliance, and innovate without sacrificing security or speed.
Below, we’ll walk through three of the cultural changes that need to take place at your organization to encourage people to embrace SecOps as they pursue innovation, speed, and scale. Read more “3 SecOps Culture Hacks You Should Embrace Today”
There’s a lot to think about when it comes to working with containers, Kubernetes, and secrets. You have to employ and communicate best practices around identity and access management in addition to choosing and implementing various tools. Whether you’re a SecOps professional at a startup, small business, or large enterprise, you need to make sure you have the right tools to keep your environments secure.
Recently, we sat down with Stenio Ferreira, Senior Solutions Engineer at HashiCorp. Armed with a degree in computer science and experience as a Java developer at a variety of companies, including IBM, Stenio migrated into a consulting role where he advised clients who wanted to start continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and improve their automation workflow. That’s where he was exposed to HashiCorp, his current company.
According to Stenio, a secrets management solution is a must — and there are various reasons to use one (such as centralized authentication). Stenio explained the services offered at HashiCorp, and shared his perspective on containers, Kubernetes, open source solutions, and Vault. Read more “A Deep Dive Into Secrets Management”
Recently I had the pleasure of joining hundreds of DevOps pros, IT managers, and security engineers at the first ever Container Security event at LEGOLAND. Attendees discussed the newest technologies, scariest threats, and biggest trends in the evolving world of container security. If you weren’t lucky enough to be a part of the fun, here’s a quick recap of what Threat Stack’s Director of Product, Todd Morneau, spoke about. Read more “Container Security: Winter is Coming — Dress in Layers!”
DevOps has enabled businesses to bring products to market faster than ever before. But what about security?
In our recent survey, Refocusing Security Operations in the Cloud Era, 36% of businesses said their top IT goal over the next year is to respond to business needs faster. Conversely, only 10.5% prioritized improving security as their top goal.
There is a misconception that businesses can’t move both quickly and securely. But with SecOps best practices, businesses can move away from the ad hoc, reactive tactics that slow things down, and replace them with repeatable processes that effectively support teams and products. Let’s explore. Read more “5 SecOps Processes to Try Today”
Organizations of all sizes have embraced DevOps as a way to deliver work quickly and reliably — but security has often fallen by the wayside in the quest for speed. In a recent survey, 85% of respondents stated that SecOps practices are important, only 35% said it’s a completely or mostly established practice in their organizations, and 18% admitted that SecOps is not established at all.
So what’s the hold up to SecOps adoption? Typically, it’s a concern that security will slow down business.
In our latest playbook — SecOps Playbook for Cloud Infrastructure, Part II: A Practitioner’s Guide for Security & Ops Teams — we offer tips on how to systematically integrate security best practices into DevOps — without sacrificing speed or security.
Introducing containers into cloud infrastructure can lead to faster development cycles as well as more efficient use of infrastructure resources. With these kinds of competitive advantages, it’s no wonder why container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes are so popular. In fact, Gartner estimates that 50 percent of companies will use container technology by 2020 — up from less than 20 percent in 2017.
While the value and popularity of containers are undeniable, deployments have opened up a whole new set of infrastructure security concerns for Development and Operations teams. This is why more and more companies are focusing on container security to ensure that they don’t ship software with known vulnerabilities, to protect sensitive data, and to maintain compliance with industry-specific regulations such as HIPAA, PCI, or SOC 2. Resources like the Center For Internet Security (CIS) benchmark reports on Kubernetes or Docker provide comprehensive, objective guidelines for organizations transitioning to containers.
In this post, we’ll walk through some of the top questions you need to ask when thinking about establishing security and maintaining regulatory compliance in a container infrastructure environment. Read more “Top 4 Questions to Ask About Compliance, Security, and Containers”
Containers bring many benefits to DevOps teams along with a number of security concerns. This post brings you details about 50 Docker training resources that are designed to train beginner, intermediate, and advanced practitioners on current knowledge about Docker.
Note: On Thursday, September 27, we’ll be holding our Builders of Tomorrow event, featuring industry experts who will be speaking about critical container security issues and best practices (see details below). We hope to see you there! Read more “50 Useful Docker Tutorials for IT Professionals (from Beginner to Advanced)”
Last month we announced that a containerized version of the Threat Stack Agent was coming soon for customers who are using containers to deploy cloud workloads. Today, we are excited to announce that our Docker Containerized Agent is now generally available up on Docker Hub. As cloud infrastructure shifts more heavily towards containers, we are pleased to bring this option to market as a way to gain unmatched visibility into the entire infrastructure — hosts, containers, and the control plane — to ensure that our customers have the best cloud security monitoring and alerting in place across all their assets. Read more “Threat Stack Announces General Availability of Its Docker Containerized Agent”
AWS offers a variety of built-in security features that users can take advantage of, but it’s easy for users of all experience levels to get lost in the sea of options and metrics. In fact, in a November 2017 survey, we found that 73% of companies have critical AWS cloud security misconfigurations, and more than one-fourth (27%) were not taking advantage of AWS-native security services like CloudTrail. (Misconfigurations are considered critical if they reduce or eliminate visibility for security or compliance, if they can be leveraged in a direct or complex attack, or if they enable trivial attacks on an AWS console.)
As an AWS Advanced Security Competency Partner, Threat Stack integrates deeply into AWS to provide its customers with unprecedented visibility, more advanced security capabilities, and a cloud-native user experience. Threat Stack’s CloudTrail integration, for instance, bridges the visibility gap between your AWS services and the core systems running in your cloud, giving you automatic alerts about changes to your instances, security groups, S3 buckets, and access keys.
Visibility is essential for sound AWS security, and continuously monitoring your security metrics is a must. Still, while many users understand the importance of ongoing monitoring, many AWS security metrics go underutilized (or ignored). To gain more insight into these important, yet often overlooked security metrics, we reached out to a panel of AWS security experts and asked them to answer this question:
“What’s the most under-used / under-appreciated metric when it comes to AWS security?”