TECHNOLOGY

On automation and machine learning as the future of security

Published

1 year ago

November 29, 2022

James Todd, SecOps director at KPMG, describes his role as a merging of SecOps, security architecture, and cloud security. It is a particularly interesting crossing point with regard to automation.

“It’s at that intersection of the cloud environment, being very much aligned to deploying everything as code,” says Todd. “A lot of automation is a big part of that. Being able to take dynamic action within a cloud environment is much easier and well-versed than within a traditional data centre or on-premises environment. The controls available to us are much more dynamic.

“That doesn’t preclude us from being able to do things within security controls on the endpoint or within on-premises data centres, but it’s a different approach.”

Research from the Enterprise Strategy Group in October found that almost half (46%) of SOC teams are automating security operations processes ‘extensively.’ Alongside this, more than half (52%) of respondents agreed with the statement that security operations were more difficult now than two years ago.

It is not surprising, therefore, that getting automation to work within the security operations centre (SOC) is a major point of emphasis for KPMG. One note from the professional services firm last year insists that automation can have a ‘significant and positive impact on the effectiveness of CISOs and their teams.’ Another, a month later, put automation, alongside upskilling and diversity, as one of the three key approaches to bridging the cybersecurity skills gap.

Todd’s unit provides SecOps consultancy and operations for financial services organisations. There are two primary types of client. One is a company that has little in the way of security operations within their organisation; they are either an organisation which has grown in size and needs a more formal process. Alternately, they are more established and want to tread the line between ‘dynamic change within their environment plus continuous change in the threat landscape,’ as Todd puts it. The second are organisations that need to go to the next level – and this is where automation can come in.

“Once that established playbook or workbook has been created in relation to a particular threat, or a particular way that incidents are handled, we look then to introduce automated processes that reduce the repetitive task element within security operations initially, and then move to the higher end of automation and introduce some level of autonomy,” says Todd. “So the SOC can react to threats in as near real-time as possible.”

Getting the balance right between automated tooling and human resources is a longstanding head-scratcher for executives. Writing in Security Week in November, Marc Solomon sums the problem up succinctly: ‘using automation to make your people more efficient, and using your people to make automation more effective.’

The simplest part of automation, Todd explains, is the robotic process automation (RPA) element, which frees time for the SOC analyst to work on incident handling, threat hunting, and other vital tasks. The next step is to move towards technologies such as machine learning to lead to more intelligent decision-making – or machine-led decision-making. “The platform builds trust in those actions and understands the impact of a particular action playing out,” says Todd.

“If I see a particular indicator file within my environment that is correlated with threat intelligence, and I know the asset that has been targeted, that asset’s security posture and also its susceptibility to the attack that’s being aimed at it, I can then use machine learning to inform a number of decisions that I can take,” he adds. “All the way through from quarantining that particular asset, limiting its movement, playing out particular activities that allow us to gain some further intelligence.”

Todd references the influential MITRE ATT&CK matrix first released in 2015, which catalogues hundreds of tactics adversaries use across enterprise operating systems. While ATT&CK is not laid out in a particular linear order, the first category, ‘initial access’, is the point where an attacker gets a foothold in an organisation’s environment. This is where Todd wants his team to be.

“The optimal goal for us is to get to a point where we’re taking action or intervening at the point that the attack is first observed within the cyber kill chain,” says Todd. “Really being slick around being able to observe and take action around the first point that an attacker tries to enter an environment.”

Todd, who is speaking at the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo Global, in London on December 1-2 around cloud security, adds that the most commonly used form of machine learning within cyber defences is anomaly detection. Right now, that’s where automation is likely to stay.

“I think [where] the human element comes into it is that machine learning is good at spotting outliers and anomalies,” says Todd. “The decision making, certainly for the moment, will reside within the analyst, within the SOC.

“Those analysts [will] be codifying and transferring their well-proven, well-exercised playbooks, or converting those playbooks into an automated approach,” adds Todd. “But I don’t think that we’re quite yet at the time where we’ve got full autonomy on decision-making.”

(Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash)

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London.

Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: cloud computing, cybersecurity, james todd, secops, Security

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud