As applications become increasingly complex, application owners yearn for tools that give them deep and continuous perspectives on the security of their applications.
Alert Logic is a cloud security vendor that offers a solution that works across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures and delivers insights into the security of individual applications gleaned from the activity of the application itself and the analysis of the data it gains from its 3,300 global customers. Alert Logic analyzes over 400 million events and identifies a staggering 50,000 security incidents every month. It then feeds these incidents back to its customer base to create a loop that eventually improves security for all.
This week, the company is rolling out its Cloud Insight product, a vulnerability and configuration management tool for Amazon Web Services (AWS) workloads. Instead of simply identifying issues, Alert Logic actually identifies the remediation actions that are needed to eliminate the vulnerability it identifies.
Cloud Insight automatically identifies vulnerabilities, analyzes their potential impact, and creates a prioritized remediation plan showing the vulnerabilities that will be eliminated with each step. With auto-discovery capabilities and continuous monitoring built in, Cloud Insight automatically detects changes across a customer’s entire AWS environment and presents a real-time, up-to-date, consolidated view of its security posture.
“Managing vulnerabilities in the cloud is fundamentally different than in any other environment,” said Gray Hall, CEO of Alert Logic. “With Alert Logic Cloud Insight we are delivering the first solution that gives businesses what they need to protect their AWS workloads – actionable intelligence to eliminate risk from both their instances and AWS services.”
The fact is that modern applications are increasingly heterogeneous, distributed and, at their base, complex. This change has increased the challenge of protecting and securing applications. With traditional security technologies, companies must perform multiple manual steps to run scans and check configurations on a regular basis, which still only provides point-in-time results. Even when IT remediates a vulnerability, it is difficult to ensure the vulnerability has truly been eradicated from the entire environment. By offering integration with AWS APIs and AWS’ CloudTrail audit tool, Cloud Insight hopes to re-invent how organizations protect AWS workloads, moving away from a manual approach to an automated, continuous, remediation-centric approach.
This is interesting since it is an extension of the many audit and log analytics platforms that exist – solutions like Loggly, SumoLogic, and even Splunk all offer to capture log data and run analytics over it. But a key message that I’ve been articulating has been the need to take the next step from those vulnerability assessments. Actually giving organizations the insights into the actions that need to be taken to resolve those issues is of greater value than simply delivering insights.
Of course, the next step for these solutions is to actually integrate directly into the control and management solutions so that the actual remediation can be automated. The loop will actually be fully closed when log data to analysis, analysis to insight, and insight to remediation can be automated in one sequence. While that is a bigger challenge to resolve, I believe that it will be the ultimate end state of solutions like Alert Logic. Watch this space.
