CTO Chris Swan's talk from Internet and Mobile World " Application centric – how the cloud has changed the way we deploy, secure and connect"

Chris Swan, CTO, @cpswan

Application centric: How the cloud has changed the way

we deploy, secure and connect

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Google moves its corporate apps to the Internet

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Google Inc., taking a new approach to enterprise security, is moving its corporate applications to the Internet. In doing so, the Internet giant is flipping common corporate security practice on its head, shifting away from the idea of a trusted internal corporate network secured by perimeter devices such as firewalls, in favor of a model where corporate data can be accessed from anywhere with the right device and user credentials. The new model — called the BeyondCorp initiative — assumes that the internal network is as dangerous as the Internet.

(Wall Street Journal | “Google Moves Its Corporate Applications to the Internet” | May 11, 2015 )

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Setting the scene

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Traditional apps

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Business applications are collections of (virtual) servers

Is the “right” traffic going to/from our servers?

Database Tier

AppServer Tier

Web Tier

= type of server

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Modern architectures don’t change things that much

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Micro services based applications are collections of services

Is the “right” traffic going to/from our services?

Persistence services

Business services

Front end services

= type of server

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Enterprise data center

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Perimeter Security

Enterprise data centers are filled with these applications, often left insecure by lack of focus on interior network paths.

20% of Security Spend is on

“interior”, yet 80% of the network traffic.

80% of Security Spend is on perimeter, 20% of traffic.

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Hard on the outside, soft on the inside

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Perimeter Security

Hacker Penetration

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One penetration creates major “East-West” exposure

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Perimeter Security

On average undetected for

234 days!

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Cloud architectures have been different

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2006 – The lonely (and exposed) VM

VM

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2008 - Overlays

VM VM VM

VM

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2009 - VPCs

VM VM VM VM

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Containment often not enough – overlays stayed

VM

VM VM VM VM

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Lots of people did something like this

VM

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Some even did something like this

VM VM

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And the really large (or paranoid) might do this

VM

VM

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Or even this

VM VM

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Thankfully almost nobody tries to do this

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What was that perimeter made of?

A quick detour to the worlds of:

Unified Threat Management (UTM) and Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

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Unified Threat Management

Firewall

NIDS/NIPS

AV

Anti Spam

VPN

DLP

Load Balancer

UTM

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Application Delivery Controllers

Cache

TLS offload

Compression

WAF

Multiplexing

Load Balancer

ADC

Traffic Shaping

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The UTM & ADC delivery model

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SDN and NFV

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Networks made from and configured by software

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We can put a bunch of ‘network’ onto a VM

Firewall

VPN

Switch

Router

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And add more functions into containers

Firewall

VPN

Switch

Router Cache

TLS offload

WAF

Load Balancer

NIDS/NIPS

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This could be thought of as an app centric perimeter

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But it refactors very readily into microservices

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The audit paradox

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Building in

CC photo by WorldSkills

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What building in looks like

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Bolting on

CC photo by arbyreed

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What bolting on looks like

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PaaS gives us the chance to ‘bolt in’

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But Docker adoption shows a movement against opinionated platforms

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If a security event happens and it isn’t monitored

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Some challenges remain

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ToDo: SecDevOps

APIs are necessary but not sufficient: Need to have them integrated into the overall system Control metadata (and its mutability): Must be visible and understandable Security events need to be captured: Then turned into something humans can action