SOLUTION BRIEF
Trellix
Cloudvisory
The bridge between security, development,
and operations
SOLUTION BRIEF
The efficiency-security balance
CIOs and CISOs have a responsibility to move their organizations
forward securely. In a perfect world, the CIO would accelerate business
operations using the latest technology and the brightest minds, while
the CISO would align security operations in lockstep with advancements
throughout the organization. In reality, more efficient and more secure
operations are rarely realized in parallel.
Moving quickly while keeping
costs low is especially challenging
where security is concerned.
More security requirements
make development more
difficult, and when developers
make security decisions without
oversight, they can create
complications for CIOs and CISOs.
The ultimate challenge is to find
opportunities for synergy across
teams with different sets of
incentives, skills, and tools to strike
an appropriate balance between
efficiency and security.
The players
There isn’t always a clear separation between developers and
operations professionals. Developers make security decisions through
their automation of infrastructure as code, while security practitioners
depend on development workflows to operate at the pace and scale
of cloud deployments.
However, development and security teams still rely on different sets of
people with different incentives, processes, and tools. Insecure cloud
deployments result from a lack of communication between such teams.
Organizations try to make DevOps more secure (SecDevOps) and to
develop new tools to make SecOps more efficient (DevSecOps). Both
approaches involve significant challenges. It’s never easy to automate
security decisions at the pace of cloud innovation and DevOps, and
security budgets aren’t built for large development teams.
Trellix Cloudvisory: The bridge between security, development, and operations 2
SOLUTION BRIEF
Elevated enterprise risk
Simple mistakes can easily become magnified in cloud environments.
The networked nature of the cloud, the automated actions via APIs,
and the dynamic deployments driven by distributed decision-making
can expand the impact of cloud security incidents.
Threat actors are poised to take advantage of these opportunities with
malicious bots and advanced persistent threats. Enterprises currently
face an unprecedented level of risk.
Typical security challenges
Security and development teams struggle to encapsulate and
translate their knowledge in a way that’s directly useful to the other.
Cloud and DevOps technologies make it possible to encapsulate and
share deployment logic as an infrastructure-as-code software repository,
which can enable fast, consistent deployment.
However, infrastructure-as-code
automation allows development
decisions—even flawed ones—
to follow the code to new
environments. For example, it can
carry over from development to
quality assurance to production.
Security teams must identify
cloud misconfigurations as
quickly as possible to catch
local bugs before they become
global incidents. Although some
developers may consider
the code self-documenting,
the language of infrastructure
as code is not immediately useful
for security practitioners.
Without a tool that can translate between security policies
and development code to minimize or prevent the impact of
misconfigurations, security teams may try to pull back control over
deployments they don’t understand. As a result, deployment velocity and
efficiency decrease as security requirements limit development options.
Trellix Cloudvisory: The bridge between security, development, and operations 3
SOLUTION BRIEF
The options
Enterprises often face a tough choice. They must choose to push
technology forward for the sake of business efficiency, or pull
technology back for the sake of business protection. They can attract
talent through innovation or drive talent away through bureaucracy.
Better options involve a hybrid Unfortunately, developers
of development and security and security professionals follow
mindsets. The development different processes that don’t
mindset may say, “Bring good always align. What works for one
development processes to group may not work for the other.
the SecOps technology.”
The security mindset may say,
“Bring good security processes
to the DevOps technology.”
Trellix Cloudvisory: The bridge between security, development, and operations 4
SOLUTION BRIEF
The solution
It’s better to facilitate communications between the two groups rather
than try to have one adopt the processes or technologies of the other.
Better communication enables:
The knowledge of the security team to be used
in development by the development team
The actions of development teams to be verified by
their security counterparts before changes are made
The automation of interactions between teams,
which can allow each team to move at its own pace,
follow its own processes, and use its own tools
Trellix Cloudvisory facilitates better communication between
development, deployment, and security teams.
Predeployment teams the time-consuming
can keep their existing process of harvesting
processes while leveraging data and removing the
knowledge from security security guesswork from
teams, importing rules gated CI/CD pipelines.
for scanning infrastructure
Security teams can use
as code and integrating
Cloudvisory as a force
development outputs with
multiplier and universal
Cloudvisory’s common pipeline
translator, allowing a small
for harvesting security events.
group of security professionals
Deployment teams can use to scale their influence
Cloudvisory to track risks by pushing their knowledge
introduced into different to the edge of the enterprise
types of environments in a useful way, which helps
(such as predeployment, translate security policy into
quality assurance, and the languages of developers
production) and automate and machines.
To learn more about Trellix, visit trellix.com.
Trellix
6220 American Center Drive
San Jose, CA 95002
www.trellix.com
About Trellix
Trellix is a global company redefining the future of cybersecurity. The company’s open and native extended detection and response
(XDR) platform helps organizations confronted by today’s most advanced threats gain confidence in the protection and resilience of their
operations. Trellix’s security experts, along with an extensive partner ecosystem, accelerate technology innovation through machine learning
and automation to empower over 40,000 business and government customers.
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