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How Deep Security Supports Better DevOps Processes 100%

December 11, 2019 by Leave a Comment

IT organizations have seen too much of their time consumed by non-strategic tasks. This comes at great cost to their bottom lines and cloud transition strategies. 

In fact, a 2018 Stripe survey found that between dealing with bad code, technical debt and various refactors or modifications, most of the typical developer workweek was wasted.  

That leaves organizations with fewer resources for pushing their operations and businesses forward – for example, by securing the transition of their workloads into the cloud. 

Enter DevOps, exit IT bottlenecks

This is why many organizations have adopted DevOps as a methodology that reimagines the connections between different teams and the technologies they use. 

Implemented right, DevOps supports better collaboration and productivity. Meanwhile, its rapid iterative approach is a perfect fit for continuous delivery paradigms, wherein developers build around microservices and containers, supported by public clouds like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Thanks to the agility enabled by the combo of DevOps, microservice architectures and containerization, developers can release and update software at a cadence that benefits both the company and its customers. High-performing DevOps organizations outdo their competitors on multiple fronts:    

  • They deploy to-market faster.
  • Their change failure rates and time to recovery are much lower.
  • Revenue and profit growth are also higher at DevOps organizations.

To realize its full value, though, DevOps-driven development in the public cloud must incorporate security at every step. In fact, Amazon Web Services (AWS) now refers to that security as “job zero.” It takes priority over everything else.

Security has been a core concern around cloud computing since day one. It’s also caused some worry around containers since their rise to prominence in the early 2010s. Fortunately, solutions like Trend Micro Deep Security for Containers make it easier to secure containerized workloads in cloud-like AWS. IT organizations no longer need to choose between moving fast and staying secure.

Using Trend Micro Deep Security in a shared security model

Let’s look at interactions between AWS and Trend Micro Deep Security, in particular, to see they balance security with the fresh agility possible through DevOps. 

Customers putting workloads into AWS follow a shared security model. Under this setup, AWS itself takes care of the fundamental security of the underlying hardware and software. This includes everything from availability zones and edge locations to storage and networking. Meanwhile, the customer takes care of tasks such as identity and access management, client/server-side encryption and securing data.

It’s the latter set of responsibilities that have posed the greatest management challenge. Common problems include lack of visibility into what’s happening across environments, low automation and general difficulty in keeping up with the overall speed of DevOps.

The Deep Security advantage

This is where Trend Micro Deep Security can provide a pivotal advantage:

  • It delivers a comprehensive set of security controls, including log inspection and anti-malware, for AWS EC2 instances and containers.
  • For EC2 instances, it integrates with AWS Security Hub, GuardDuty, Lambda and other native security services.
  • It handles orchestration and automation through Puppet, Chef and Ansible.
  • Containerized workloads get full-stack protection, e.g. at the host OS, Kubernetes, Docker and container levels.
  • Intuitive features such as Deep Security Smart Check make it easy to identify and address vulnerabilities.

As a whole, Deep Security helps protect cloud instances and containers. This, in turn, simplifies compliance with applicable regulations as well as incident responses. IT organizations can capitalize on the promise of DevOps by moving beyond manual tasks and related complications.

Trend Micro itself is part of the AWS Partner Network, a partner of choice for AWS Managed Services, and a top security provider for many AWS customers.

Learn more Deep Security 

Softchoice and Trend Micro teamed up to deliver a recent webinar exploring container security using Deep Security in AWS. View the full session.

 

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3 Ways Your Infrastructure is Preventing IT Resilience

November 28, 2019 by Leave a Comment

IT resilience

Among the biggest obstacles to IT resilience is the “data dilemma.” 

That data has become “the new oil” is a well-worn cliché by now. But clichés earn that status because they originate in the truth. And it’s true that today, data drives the decision-making that moves businesses forward. Protecting it is more important than ever.  

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Softchoice Launches Backup as a Service to Improve IT Resilience

November 14, 2019 by Leave a Comment

Protect the data and applications critical to your business.  

Data has a significant impact on the way we do business, enabling innovation, defining how we engage our customers and expand our ability to generate revenue. With IDC forecasting that by 2025 the global data sphere will grow to 175 Billion Terabytes of information, businesses will need to be more strategic and efficient in the way they manage – and protect – their data. 

The increase in global cyberattacks is a clear and present reminder of the critical importance of a proactive and integrated plan for cyber resilience and business continuity. This means maintaining backup and recovery operations is a year-round, 24/7 job for IT teams. 

Meanwhile, complex and fragmented infrastructure, use of legacy storage technology such as tapes, and the constant threat of security breach make data and application availability a constant concern. As a result, we struggle to ensure that backup is supporting its primary purpose of risk mitigation while managing the solution in-place and the cost to maintain it. 

 To address this need Softchoice has launched Backup as a Service (BaaS) which offers a fully managed and cloud-connected backup and recovery solution for on-premise environments conveniently billed as a monthly service. Through automation, proactive monitoring and detection, Softchoice BaaS protects critical data while helping manage and reduce total cost of ownership. The key capabilities of this service include:  

  • Unified backup and recovery: Quick and efficient backup and recovery for all your virtual and physical workloads in one unified solution. 
  • Resolution Support: Mitigate risks of downtime and accelerate recovery with dual backup to the cloud and on-site appliances as well as 24/7/365 expert resolution support. 
  • Configuration Mentorship: Receive guidance on best practices for your backup strategy via 30- to 60-minute technical conversations by telephone, email or online meeting. 
  • Technical Support: A single centralized support team providing 24/7/365 live answer support, a service portal, incident and escalation management and ITIL service management. 
  • Implementation: Combine on-site appliances with cloud storage to enable quick recovery when needed, and cost-effective cloud storage for long-term retention. 
  • Managed Backup Operations: Taking care of the implementation and the day-to-day operations, freeing your IT team to work on strategic projects. 
  • Testing: Confirm your recoverability by testing production backups twice a year. This includes testing for granular files or full virtual machine recovery. 

Softchoice Backup as a Service enables businesses to protect, locate and recover more information in less time, across any combination of platforms, locations and storage environments and reduces the cost of maintaining separate backup technologies. The streamlining and maintaining of data coupled with Softchoice’s Managed Data Center & Network Services also offers businesses with a holistic data center strategy that is critical for fueling data-driven businesses.  

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