McAfee and Skyhigh Networks’ first joint security product since McAfee acquired the cloud access security broker (CASB) earlier this year targets workloads running in Microsoft Azure.
Today, McAfee said it extended its cloud security software, which protects infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS), to applications on the Azure cloud. It already supported Amazon Web Services (AWS).
And it’s developing technology to extend the cloud security software to applications running in containers and serverless platforms like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions, said Anand Ramanathan, vice president of product management at McAfee. Container security is slated for mid-year, with serverless to follow in the second half or 2018 or early 2019.
“We’re going deeper into these cloud platforms, using more of the native services these cloud platforms offer, and we will continue to deepen our security controls as they relate to those various platform services,” Ramanathan said.
McAfee is also looking at adding support for Google Cloud, as well as Oracle and SAP’s public clouds, Ramanathan added.
The company’s cloud security portfolio includes McAfee Skyhigh Security Cloud, McAfee Virtual Network Security Platform (McAfee vNSP), and McAfee Cloud Workload Security (McAfee CWS). McAfee Skyhigh Security Cloud for Azure is available now, and McAfee vNSP’s support of Azure customers will be available by the end of March. McAfee CWS, including support for Azure, became available earlier this year.
“IaaS public cloud adoption among our customers is increasing extremely rapidly, and our customers are migrating applications from their private data centers into public cloud platforms like AWS and Azure,” Ramanathan said. “Customers are investing in multiple public cloud platforms; McAfee supports AWS, and now we’re adding Azure.”
Crazy for CASB
Security is the most commonly cited benefit of moving workloads to the cloud, according to Cisco’s latest annual cybersecurity report. And a McAfee survey found 91 percent of CIOs and CISOs trust the cloud to secure their workloads more this year than they did last year.
“Customers believe cloud is more secure than private data centers, and this is accurate,” Ramanathan said. “But Gartner also says 99 percent of cloud security failures are the customer’s fault,” he added, citing Gartner’s most recent CASB Magic Quadrant report.
That’s why cloud security — and specifically CASB technology — is becoming more important to companies.
CASB is on-premises or cloud-based software that sits between cloud-service consumers and cloud-service providers. It enforces security and governance policies for cloud applications, allowing companies to extend their on-premises policies to the cloud.
Gartner predicts that by 2020, 60 percent of large enterprises will use a CASB to govern cloud services, up from less than 10 percent today. The firm also named Skyhigh as one of three CASB “leaders.”
“It’s about the data in the public cloud but also the network, and with [the Skyhigh acquisition] we are able to offer an integrated portfolio that covers the entire stack,” Ramanathan said.