Nick Savvides - Business manager of Information Protection, Symantec
Symantec business manager information protection, Nick Savvides urged partners not to be complacent when it comes to Cloud security, outlined during the Westcon-Comstor Imagine 2016 roadshow.
Savvides reminded channel partners that while Cloud offers business "accessibility, elasticity and scalability", it also hinders control and visibility and as a result, enterprises cannot perceive security risks.
Citing the growth of Amazon Web Services, at 49 per cent per year, Savvides questioned the security issues that arise for businesses as they transition from on-premise to the Cloud.
“No businesses are building their own datacentre anymore and the way that people are consuming applications has changed completely,” he said.
“The average enterprise has roughly 400 applications running in its Cloud that it is unaware of and 30 per cent of corporate data lives inside the Cloud beyond IT purview.”
Savvides stressed that Software-as-a-Service application security should be prioritised as the concept of the "static identity of a simple username and password is obsolete".
Savvides also asserted that a high level of identity and access management can be maintained through Multi-Factor Authentication platforms, while questioning the security issues of Cloud infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
In front of Sydney-based reseller, Savvides provided damning indictment of many Cloud infrastructure providers, claiming the native security offered by Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to be "inadequate".
“They are good at providing security at the base-level infrastructure, but the rest is up to you," he said. "The traditional approaches also do not work because businesses often don’t know exactly what is running in the Cloud.
“They need to ask, is it authorised? Is my policy being applied to these new systems? It is the organisation's responsibility to secure the applications.”
According to Savvides, Symantec has retooled its existing on-premise technologies to work natively with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to understand availability zones and templated workloads so it can integrate security policies at the DevOps side.
“We take all of those mechanisms and feed it into a single pane of glass that allows us to look through and understand what people within an enterprise are doing,” he added.
