Introduction:
The evolving digital landscape has witnessed a shift in workloads and applications from traditional data centers to both public and private cloud environments. To leverage enhanced adaptability, versatility, and scalability, organizations are now deploying tasks across multiple clouds. In order to ensure a successful multicloud security approach, consistent visibility and unified security controls across all clouds are crucial. Cisco MultiCloud Defense emerges as a powerful solution that enables organizations to confidently navigate the multicloud network security environment by leveraging a highly scalable and agile security infrastructure.
Securing the Multicloud Landscape:
Within the dynamic realm of the cloud, seamless connectivity, encryption, and automation prevail. Organizations find economic advantages in the cloud’s ability to streamline business processes and applications. However, the perpetually changing threat landscape demands secure environments, workloads, and applications to ensure compliance. Cisco MultiCloud Defense offers a robust platform that allows organizations to focus on applications and policies while simplifying the complexities of cloud infrastructure.
Key Solutions Offered by MultiCloud Defense:
- Ingress Security (IPS/IDS/WAF):
With numerous exploits lurking in the digital landscape, organizations establish rules for detecting and preventing potential threats, safeguarding both web and non-web applications.
- Egress Security:
As cloud applications gain the capability to establish independent connections for updates, maintenance, and third-party services, organizations must ensure secure communication with the appropriate services.
- East/West Segmentation:
Enterprises aim for sustainable and manageable macro-segmentation, incorporating cloud-native network security features.
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP):
Addressing compliance and security concerns related to sensitive data such as PII and PHI becomes crucial for organizations, making DLP an essential component of multicloud security.
- Multicloud Networking:
Enterprises strive for secure connectivity among diverse cloud infrastructures.
Key Metrics of Value for Customers:
Cisco MultiCloud Defense offers several key advantages for customers:
- Accelerating time to value:
Teams can swiftly onboard new cloud accounts, deploy security rapidly, and seamlessly map existing policies across clouds through automated and orchestrated processes.
- Enhancing efficiency and accuracy:
By minimizing labor-intensive tasks and reducing misconfigurations, organizations can achieve greater operational efficiency. Auto-scaling capabilities enable secure scalability on demand, adapting to fluctuating traffic demands.
- Minimizing overhead:
MultiCloud Defense streamlines solutions, curbing vendor sprawl, and facilitates swift implementation of security measures in new cloud environments with minimal training for teams.
Cisco’s MultiCloud Defense Architecture:
Cisco MultiCloud Defense offers a highly scalable, agile, and robust security service tailored for multicloud environments. It aligns with the decoupling principle found in public clouds and SDN, resulting in two integral components:
- MultiCloud Defense Controller
- MultiCloud Defense Gateways.
Organizations can integrate their cloud environments into the system, enabling the safeguarding of infrastructure through either distributed or centralized security architecture.
MultiCloud Defense Controller:
The Multicloud Defense Controller operates as a scalable, resilient, and multitenant service, automating and orchestrating infrastructure through enforcement points (gateways). It ensures application security across various clouds and facilitates integration with third-party SIEMs and alerting services.
Capabilities of MultiCloud Defense Controller:
- Instantaneous identification of multicloud networks and workloads
- Cloud-native management of gateways with self-healing and auto-scaling capabilities
- Compliance with SOC2 Type2, PCI DSS, and cloud provider design patterns
- Continuous integration of security intelligence feeds from Cisco TalosĀ®
- Dynamic multicloud policies based on real-time workload discovery
- Built-in metering of customer usage for Multicloud Defense Gateways
MultiCloud Defense Gateways:
Employing a patented single-pass pipelined architecture, the Multicloud Defense Gateways offer advanced inline security measures within the customer’s cloud account. As a PaaS, these gateways provide high throughput, low latency, and flexibility in selecting relevant network security inspection engines.
Highly Scalable Ingress and Egress Gateways:
Users can deploy highly scalable and resilient egress or ingress gateways, securing outbound, inbound, and east/west traffic within their public cloud accounts.
Security Models:
Cisco MultiCloud Defense offers adaptable deployment models for security integration:
- Distributed,
- Centralized,
- Combined.
These models ensure scalability, resiliency, and agility based on cloud deployment best practices.
Conclusion:
With Cisco MultiCloud Defense, organizations can confidently embrace the multicloud network security landscape. By leveraging a scalable and agile security infrastructure, Cisco enables robust protection for workloads and applications across different cloud environments. With its comprehensive solutions and key advantages, Cisco MultiCloud Defense empowers organizations to navigate the evolving challenges of cloud security while focusing on business growth and innovation.