TECHNOLOGY

why expired machine identities represent a growing business risk

Published

1 year ago

October 24, 2022

Kevin Bocek, VP of security strategy and threat intelligence, Venafi, explains how cloud complexity and multicloud is increasing the number of outages.

Spotify users recently experienced an event that is becoming all-too familiar to digital consumers. They were left unable to listen to their favourite podcasts for hours after an TLS certificate at the streaming giant expired. Although certificates, or ‘machine identities’, like these are intended to provide a backbone of trust across the online world, they are also increasingly challenging for organisations to manage. Digital transformation is driving an unprecedented expansion of machine identity volumes across the globe. That’s bad news for the security teams tasked with managing them. When even one expires, it can lead to chaos.

Spotify is certainly not the first big-name brand impacted in this way. And it definitely won’t be the last. The message is clear: brands need a more efficient, automated way to manage these identities if they want to optimise cybersecurity and service uptime.

An expensive challenge

While human identity is authenticated and secured via usernames and passwords, machine identities use keys and certificates to validate the legitimacy of information flowing between authorised machines. They can be used to secure privileged access, DevOps assets and web transactions, authenticate software code, and enable secure, remote access to enterprise networks. But what happens when those identities expire? A certificate-related outage of the sort that recently affected Spotify, creates downtime and security risks until it is resolved.

That could end up having a major financial and reputational impact. Exactly how much is open to debate, as accurate data is difficult to come by. A Gartner study from years ago puts the figure at $5,600 per minute of IT downtime. A more recent study from ITIC claimed that just one hour of server downtime totals $300,000+ for 91% percent of SMEs and large enterprises. Over two-fifths (44%) of respondents said an hour costs over $1m. That’s not to mention the impact of poor customer experience, reduced worker productivity, diminished brand value, supply chain disruption and other factors highlighted in this research.

Getting worse

The bad news is that machine identity management is becoming more challenging for security teams as their organisations embark on a proliferation of digital initiatives. Research reveals that two-thirds (65%) of businesses increased technology spend during the pandemic. They invested in IoT systems to streamline business processes, laptops and mobile devices for hybrid workers, and new internal and customer-facing apps and websites to improve user experiences. In the cloud, containers, APIs and more help to drive DevOps and greater business agility. But all of these new assets need machine identities to help secure them.

Research reveals that the average business used nearly 250,000 machine identities at the end of 2021. Yet it’s predicted that they’ll double this inventory to at least 500,000 by 2024. With so many certificates to issue and manage, it’s no surprise that some slip through the cracks.

The challenge is made that much harder by separate trends occurring in the marketplace. Leading browsers are demanding that organisations change their machine identities every year, which will accelerate the frequency with which they must rotate certificates. What’s more, Let’s Encrypt, now the world’s leading certificate authority (CA), and many of its peers, are now only issuing machine identities for 90 days. They’re doing this to limit any potential damage from key compromise and mis-issuance. But forcing more frequent renewals makes missed expiration dates more likely. This doesn’t just increase the risk of outages, it can create additional security risks, by exposing websites to man-in-the-middle and phishing attacks.

It’s time to automate

This is a situation that can no longer be managed manually. Even organisations with modest digital transformation plans will soon find the number of keys and certificates they need to keep track of spiralling out of control. The answer is to invest in a control plane which enables automated management of machine identities throughout their lifespan.

There are several ways that intelligent automation of this kind can benefit organisations and their security administrators. First, they can be set to intuitively discover all corporate certs across cloud, virtual and physical assets, and then catalogue them in a centralised repository. That will provide continuous visibility. Next, control tools can be deployed to automatically verify security compliance: ensuring all certificates have the right owners, attributes, and configurations no matter which CA issued them. Finally, and most important for mitigating the risk of expiration, tools can help teams continuously monitor all of their certs, alert them when one is about to expire and even automatically renew.

Being able to install, configure and validate certificates proactively before they expire, and in seconds, not only reduces security risk and the threat of financial and reputational damage that stems from outages. It also frees up security staff to work on high value strategic tasks. In a world where security talent is in increasingly short supply, that’s yet another reason to automate away the challenges of machine identity management.

Related Topics:business expired growing identities Machine represent risk

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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