In the cybersecurity realm, it’s crucial for business leaders to understand there are only two states: those that have been compromised and those that will be compromised. Successful breaches can affect a company’s reputation and cost substantial amounts of money.
Cybersecurity leaders should be prepared for the possibility of a breach. They need a combination of defence and detection measures to improve protection against threats across their cloud environments.
Delivering high availability, optimal infrastructure performance and strong security are paramount for any organisation. Load balancers help achieve these goals by distributing client network traffic across multiple servers and geographic locations, when appropriate, to minimise downtime and provide an enhanced application experience.
CIOs are experiencing ongoing support costs for their existing cloud load balancers. This is driving them to seek out more cost-effective alternatives that enable them to scale their load-balancing architecture more flexibly without considerable spikes in their operational costs.
It’s complex and costly to secure applications with the native security architectures present in cloud providers. Cloud service providers often provide complicated instructions about what customers are advised to do. Technology leaders should look at the features and functionality provided by the architecture’s components before tackling how they can achieve the same deployment outcomes with less complexity and cost.
Effective cloud security requires technology beyond firewalls to grant network management teams visibility across the network; tech professionals can only see the flow of activity and any attempted hacks in real-time. Some fundamental infrastructure security requirements include:
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Simplify Access Control Lists
The first step for any cloud security strategy should be to limit access to your environment. This is the function of access control lists that all cloud providers provide by default. These access control lists will limit the source IP addresses, protocols and ports permitted to access resources in the cloud environment. In many cases, this is enough to permit or deny access. But, for those organizations with strict security policies, there may be a need to implement a cloud firewall, which adds another layer of security and flexibility.
Enterprise-grade load balancers perform vital functions of encryption standards enforcement, web application firewall and intrusion prevention. They also enable users to control the bandwidth of data flowing through to serve high-priority applications and limit bandwidth congestion. They can even export flow data, which is critical to indicate any suspicious or malicious network behaviour.
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Web Application Firewall (WAF)
A WAF augments the protection provided by other security solutions but doesn’t replace traditional network firewalls. It operates at various stack layers, including the application, transport and network layers. WAFs are a critical component of modern multi-layered defences because they provide additional protection for web applications and security that goes beyond traditional defence solutions.
When you extend this geographically into multiple cloud computing regions, you need a way to decide whether this traffic goes to Region 1 or Region 2, east, west, central or wherever else it needs to go. A geo-load balancer performs this service. Its purpose is to verify that a request for a hostname is resolved to an IP address and best satisfies the customer’s access request. This architecture is scalable for very large environments.
A Flow Collector receives flow data from devices throughout the network and uses this information to provide reports, dashboards and alerts to provide organizations with necessary insights on performance and security. Flow data is notoriously difficult to get out of cloud environments. A load balancer generates flow data so this will provide clear visibility for traffic accessing business-critical applications in the cloud. You can use this data to detect anomalies in the traffic that point to possible performance issues or malicious activity happening against the published applications.
Everyone will tell you that layered security is the best practice for improving protection for cloud or on-premises environments. A load balancer plays an important role in this approach, where applications are so vital to the success of the business.
Enabling WAF, pre-authentication, network telemetry (flow data) and/or any other security feature on the load balancer greatly decreases the chances of compromise of those applications running in the cloud.