Back in the day, adding a server meant ordering a new 2U, sliding it into a rack, and you were off to the races. Virtualization came along and made provisioning faster and easier, but even virtual machines were relatively static and long-lived.
With public cloud and new deployment techniques, we are seeing a rapid shift toward stateless, temporary computing… think ‘disposable’ servers. No matter if you are deploying typical n-tier applications, or newer-generation Microservices, the trend today is toward auto-scale, rapid deployment and live workload swap-outs with techniques like blue/green deployments. Without having to acquire resources for the maximum capacity your application may need, it becomes possible and cost-effective to burst applications during intense periods.
At Trend Micro, we are seeing the adoption of auto-scale every day. We are helping companies large and small secure instances that may only exist for minutes or hours. In a short span of time, we see our security SaaS users increase or decrease hundreds of workloads.
Anton Chuvakin from Gartner lists some of the challenges he has come across for security in the move to IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services. He is spot-on that provisioning and architecture have changed the way you have to treat server and network security.
The key is having security management that is fully, deeply connected to the cloud APIs and security that is enforced around each workload. You move away from identifying by IP or hostname, towards Cloud ID… away from statically provisioning policy, to auto assigning policy by tags. You overcome the challenges Anton is seeing by working within the elasticity of the cloud, instead of trying to replicate the traditional on-premise architecture.
So rather than focus on the challenges, choose the right tools, the right architecture, and focus on the opportunities.
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