Organizations are accelerating their move to cloud to drive business innovation and customer success. In fact, 74% of respondents to a 2020 LogicMonitor survey believe that 95% of workloads will migrate to cloud in the next five years. At the same time, cloud poses new cybersecurity challenges as teams struggle to keep pace with the growing diversity of threats across complex IT environments.

Common Cloud Security Challenges

An Open and Unified Approach to Hybrid Cloud Security

With hybrid adoption growing so rapidly, security teams need to drive an open and unified approach across on-premises and cloud environments, one that connects disparate threat telemetry sources and cloud services with advanced analytics to break down the silos between teams and tools. The ability to drive visibility across distributed workloads and integrate security tools are foundational elements.

Establish Visibility 

As more workloads migrate to the cloud, it is critical to understand who is using what and why. This includes having a unified view of cloud access and usage, with the proper policies and controls in place to grant and deny access. In order to establish visibility, vendors are collaborating with cloud service providers across technology initiatives that embrace cloud-native services. In doing so, organizations benefit from an open approach that focuses on deep and broad technology integrations that complement their existing cloud investments while accelerating their cloud journey.

 Integrate and Align Security Tools 

The ability to gain visibility across users, data, endpoints and networks is critical to understanding and prioritizing threats, particularly in hybrid cloud environments. ReliaQuest, a global managed security services provider that combines a threat management platform with 24/7 global technical expertise, highlights the need for centralized visibility across multicloud environments.

In a recent interview with Information Security Media Group, Joe Partlow, chief technology officer of ReliaQuest, emphasizes that “most enterprises only have about 40% visibility into their entire enterprise, while at the same time 93% of enterprises have a cloud strategy.”

“So right now, it’s a really big gap in visibility. There’s a lot of integration and correlation that has to happen, there’s large volumes of data and a lot of times, to get that centralized data logging is a heavy lift for a lot of orgs. But at the same time, it’s important and we feel it’s a must have,” Partlow observes.

Once visibility has been established across the threat landscape, teams can leverage solutions that embed cloud-native services to deliver repeatable security outcomes via a single pane of glass. For example, security practitioners can automatically chain events across cloud misconfigurations and suspicious user activity into a single, prioritized offense.

Accelerating Digital Transformation With Cloud Marketplaces

As organizations move more workloads to the cloud to scale their business, they are expanding their use of cloud marketplaces to meet their security needs. Third-party cloud marketplaces, such as the AWS Marketplace, are an increasingly popular way for security professionals to find, buy and deploy software and services that enterprises need to run their business.

“Security is top of mind for our customers’ cloud deployments and they are looking for solutions that complement AWS native services to improve their cloud security posture,” says Chris Grusz, director of business development, AWS Marketplace, Service Catalog, and Control Tower, AWS .“Technology initiatives with IBM are helping our shared customers to take advantage of broader hybrid cloud threat telemetry with advanced analytics to drive repeatable security outcomes and a seamless customer experience.”

As more organizations look to simplify and extend their security visibility across environments, it becomes more critical than ever to instill an open and collaborative approach to security, one that leverages cloud marketplaces to deliver security outcomes across threat management and digital trust domains. Here are some examples of IBM listings in AWS Marketplace to help accelerate the journey to cloud.

Visibility and Control Across the Threat Landscape

Extend visibility and insights into the most critical threats via deep integrations with cloud-native services including advanced rules, reports, saved searches and cloud dashboards so that teams can easily visualize and prioritize offenses wherever they occur.

Extended Data Protection

Help customers scale and innovate in cloud, while safeguarding sensitive data throughout their data protection journey.

Seamless and Secure Identity and Access Management

Provide single sign-on and multifactor authentication to applications and resources across hybrid environments while enhancing cloud-native controls.

Fraud Detection and Advanced Risk-Based Authentication

Help customers detect fraud, authenticate users and establish identity trust across the omnichannel customer journey, including deep and broad integrations across cloud-native services.

An open and collaborative approach to security enables organizations to mature their cloud security posture as their business needs evolve. Through collaboration with cloud service providers, IBM is helping provide a more seamless customer experience and reducing security complexity for customers as they move further into cloud.

Learn how IBM Security’s expanded technology initiatives with AWS are helping to secure hybrid cloud environments and check out the new paid listings.

IBM Security is recognized as an AWS Advanced Technology Partner and AWS Premier Consulting Partner that has attained the AWS Security Competency designation for both product and services leadership.