Cloud computing adoption is gradually picking up steam, yet legitimate concerns about security, data portability, auditing, compliance, and other issues have kept some IT departments on the sidelines. Security solution vendor StillSecure hopes to tackle some cloud security concerns with their new Cloud Network Security Appliance (NSA).
"Security in a cloud environment can be both a black box and a minefield of risk at the same time. Most people aren't prepared to cope with the kind of exposure and weaknesses that used to be hidden behind a firewall," said Carl Brooks, an infrastructure and cloud computing analyst at The 451 Group that was quoted in the StillSecure NAS launch announcement. "Fear of the unknown and having to rely on the 'just trust us' model are a bad combination. That's why security remains one of the key factors preventing cloud adoption."
The StillSecure NSA is intended to be installed as part of a public cloud infrastructure, and offers up public cloud equivalents of a web application firewall, IDPS, and firewall, but can also be upgraded to handle vulnerability scanning, log management,IDS, and also PCI compliance via StillSecure's PCI Complete service.
"One of the big concerns many IT professionals have [about the cloud] is where the security comes from," says James Brown, CTO of StillSecure. "Another concern many have is isolating their resources from other resources in a public cloud. The way we configure the [StillSecure NSA] their cloud services are completely segregated...from the standpoint of the network, we've created a private cloud solution within those public cloud resources."
Are security concerns still keeping you out of the cloud? Share your thoughts by adding a comment to this blog post or contributing to the discussion on Twitter.
- Follow Jeff James on Twitter at @jeffjames3 – Google+ add Jeff to your circles
- Follow Windows IT Pro on Twitter at @windowsitpro