What Cloud Native Security Means for You and Your Peers Today

Prisma Cloud from Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast.

Security is very understandably a major source of concern when an organization makes the shift to cloud native.

Before beginning a cloud native journey, determining how network security will change in cloud native environments is among the chief concerns.

Security practices and governance must also likely span different architectures. These can range from virtual machines (VMs) and serverless functions to Kubernetes platforms. Legacy applications and infrastructures will also typically need to be taken into account. Meanwhile, it will also be of interest to DevOps engineers to ensure security processes are applied at the beginning of the production cycle in a way that will not hinder the cadence to deploy applications ever faster.

These and other questions and concerns about cloud native security will serve as talking points during The State of Cloud Native Security virtual summit to take place on June 24.

What Cloud Native Security Means for You and Your Peers Today by Palo Alto Networks and Prisma Cloud

The virtual summit will also feature findings from a survey of 3,000 cloud architecture, InfoSec and DevOps professionals that formed the basis of “The State of Cloud Native Security 2020” report. With The New Stack, cloud native security experts from Palo Alto Networks and Accenture, which conducted the research, will discuss the findings during the summit.

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, Keith Mokris, head of product marketing, Prisma Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, and Mark Rauchwarter, cloud and infrastructure security for Accenture, discuss the key talking points of the Prisma Cloud Native Security Summit and what the results of the survey mean for the DevOps community.

What the study’s results say about what peers at other organizations are experiencing when making their cloud native journey should especially be of interest, Rauchwarter said.

“One of the things that really resonates with our clients a lot of times is they want to know what everybody else is doing. They want to understand where they are on their journey,” Rauchwarter said. They want to know “where they should be along on their journey and what additional items they should be looking at that they’re maybe not looking at yet — and trying to understand what it means to them.”

The survey results helped to quantify many of the underlying trends about how organizations are protecting the applications they develop and deploy for cloud native deployments. One of the key findings the survey result reflected was “regardless of where you look, cloud native architectures, Devs, DevOps and DevSecOps practices have really become a central pillar of infrastructure and operations strategy,” Mokris said. “And so I think a lot of people know this market is taking off when it comes to all this different infrastructure.”

Where organizations are in their cloud native journeys varies, while they also share many common security challenges and concerns. Some organizations, for example, “are doing simple lift and shift of their existing infrastructure from the data centers into clouds and some are going after more of the cloud native type development,” Rauchwarter said. “But what we’re seeing is a number of those clients are struggling with making sure that what they’re doing in the cloud and what they’re developing in the cloud environments is truly secure.”

At the same time, organizations are also curious to know, as mentioned above, about “understanding where each of our organizations are at along the journey and comparing ourselves to the others,” Rauchwarter said.

“Are we behind or ahead of the curve? Are we totally missing something that we should actually be focusing on?” Rauchwarter said. “And I think the results from the [information from the survey and summit] will definitely pull out that more, and they’ll be able to understand and take some hopefully actionable items away from it back to their organizations as to areas that they should focus on.”

Join Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks June 24 at 9:00 AM PDT at The State of Cloud Native Security virtual summit for a full discussion of the “The State of Cloud Native Security” report and other topics relevant to your organization’s digital journey. The summit will feature a panel session hosted by The New Stack’s Founder and Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams, with security thought leaders from Accenture and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks.