Evolving Security for Government Multiclouds

Understanding and prioritizing cloud risk: Gartner predicts that by 2025, 99% of cloud security incidents will be an enterprise's own fault, as cloud processes are managed by well-intentioned employees with little knowledge of secure cloud configuration or understanding of highly dynamic cloud environments.

Applying security policies across multicloud environments: Agencies must ensure security across infrastructure, applications, and data in multiple clouds. But managing a multicloud architecture is extremely complex, as cloud providers can be very different in terms of access and resource management.

Gaining workload visibility and understanding risk exposure: The whirlwind pace of cloud adoption creates new opportunities for threats as the attack surface expands. Security teams may find it difficult to keep pace with agile development methodologies and, in the process, lose visibility into infrastructure and risk.

Ensuring misconfiguration does not expose private services or data: Continuous development, testing, and deployment improves efficiency, but can also allow misconfigurations to slip through the cracks and introduce security vulnerabilities.

Achieving workload segmentation: IP-based network segments are typically configured to be open whether they need to be or not, which increases the attack surface. Workload segmentation, on the other hand, uses machine learning and cryptographic identity to segment application workloads and automatically update security policies.

Routing traffic among multicloud environments: Multiple environments can mean fragmented security solutions across the various cloud and data center environments. Fragmented security creates points of weakness that can make agencies vulnerable to attack.

Implement zero trust: Protecting government data in a cloud-based, mobile-enabled world demands a “trust nothing, inspect everything” approach as mandated by the May 2021 cybersecurity executive order. A recent survey of federal cybersecurity decision-makers found that 82% agree allocating staff and budget to zero trust is vital to national security.

Securely connect users, devices, and workloads using business policies over any network: A cloud-delivered approach to providing fast, seamless, and policy-based access to external and internal applications can ensure employees work securely and productively from anywhere.

Reduce risk of lateral threat movement: Identity-based workload protection prevents lateral movement of malware and ransomware across servers, cloud workloads, and desktops.

Simplify cloud communications: Once lateral threat movement has been reduced, the next step is to secure workload communications to the Internet, other clouds, and data centers. Agencies need zero-trust connectivity across multicloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure, securing workload-to-Internet, workload-to-workload, and workload-to-data-center communications without the need for hubs, virtual firewalls, VPNs, or network-based policies.