Rising to the Cloud Security Challenge

For as long as anyone cares to remember the biggest inhibitor to cloud adoption has been concerns about security. In fact, when it comes to security the primary enemy has always been integration. By definition, the greater the number of points of integration there are the less secure something is. From an IT security perspective cloud computing, of course, is the ultimate form of integration.

But as much as integration might be part of the problem it’s also a big part of the solution. The more integrated security technologies become the more effective IT security solutions become inside and out of the cloud. For that reason, many IT security vendors are taking advantage of well-documented application programming interfaces (APIs) to drive a wave of alliances that go well beyond the basic marketing agreement.

Case in point is Check Point Software Technologies and Adallom. The two vendors today announced they have integrated the threat emulation technology that Check Point developed with a set of cloud access brokering technologies that Adallom makes available on premise or a cloud service to give IT organizations control over who inside their organization can access what specific software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

Yinon Costica, vice president of product for Adallom, said thanks in part to APIs crafting cloud security solutions is not only becoming simpler, the cloud application environment is rapidly becoming more secure than on premise IT environments. The reason for this is that by and large the organizations that build and manage SaaS application tend to have more security expertise than an internal IT organization and, secondly, the governance tools that IT organizations now have at their disposal have substantially improved.

Naturally, Adallom is expecting that by partnering with Check Point it will gain access to a fairly extensive base of potential partners that participate in the Check Point channel program. That model has already worked for Adallom elsewhere, which counts among its investors Hewlett-Packard. For solution providers those relationships create an intriguing opportunity to craft solutions that span the HP, Check Point and Adallom product portfolios. After all, regardless of security concerns at this point just about every organization is using at least one or more SaaS application. Not as clear is the degree to which usage of those applications is in compliance with any number of regulations.

There’s almost no IT organization these days that isn’t willing to at the very least have a conversation about cloud application security and governance as part of a larger effort to move many of these application out of the proverbial shadows. The challenge facing solution providers today is finding the right set of technologies to back that conversation up with a solution that gives IT organizations the level of control over cloud applications that many of them desperately seek.