Securing Your Corporate Identity in a Complex Hybrid World

February 27, 2024

Your digital identity is your corporate identity — and it’s under attack. Today’s organizations are up against a new wave of threats that are purposefully designed to disrupt your services, steal your data and extort your businesses in new ways. Unfortunately, in modern hybrid and multi-cloud landscapes, conventional security tools and processes are not stacking up. From disjointed visibility and increased risk to massive overhead and overreliance on point products, businesses need a more effective way to defend their applications — wherever they run.

 

 

New Challenges Emerge

With over 85% of organizations adopting hybrid cloud delivery models, modern businesses are finding themselves in a highly fluid and complex world.1 Favoring speed and flexibility, workloads are sprawling across multiple clouds, at the edge and on premises. Yet, conventional security approaches that worked in the data center aren't keeping pace. As host environments and digital footprints rapidly transform, businesses are left with an inefficient and siloed approach to managing and protecting their critical apps from cyber threats.

 

  • Advanced Threats
    Whether you know it or not, your customer-facing services are subject to a barrage of persistent threats that can adapt quickly to your defenses. These attacks are often automated and executed at scale and designed to extort business data. From malicious bots and malware to DDoS and zero-day breaches, cyber threats come in all shapes and sizes, leveraging a myriad of tactics to exploit apps and APIs. As if maintaining strides with these evolving threats wasn't difficult enough, hybrid cloud landscapes compound these challenges, creating new security complexities and unmanaged risks that businesses must account for.
  • Native Tooling
    Multiple clouds are the new norm. With over 90% of enterprises leveraging multi-cloud environments, business apps are living across numerous public and private cloud infrastructures.2 While each cloud offers native capabilities, they are proprietary and cannot reach across clouds (much less applications running in your data center). Without centralized governance and security in place, SecOps teams must individually manage and secure applications on a cloud-by-cloud basis. Not only does this require time and effort to learn, operate and oversee each bespoke cloud, but it also introduces risks and gaps in coverage.
  • Limited Protections
    Conventional security measures are often designed for on-premises environments. Geared toward protecting legacy applications and their underlying infrastructure, traditional approaches rely on local controls that face limitations when applied to cloud or distributed environments. With a deep reliance on manual processes and signature-based detection, conventional protections are often inadequate when securing cloud-based apps and their growing API layers. This requires organizations to either purchase more security tools or build and maintain in-house capabilities to safeguard modern workloads from advanced threats and somehow maintain understanding of how workloads interact with each other both internally and externally.

 

 

Centralize Hybrid Cloud Security

To successfully protect hybrid and multi-cloud landscapes, organizations need a simpler approach that uniformly scales across traditional and modern apps. Optiv works with businesses to understand their cloud investments and digital presence to get apps, assets and data protected. Together with F5, we enable organizations to reduce complexity while eliminating reliance on cloud-native tooling, outdated security approaches, or in-house, proprietary capabilities.

 

 

Optiv + F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Unlike traditional or piecemeal approaches, Optiv and F5 break down security silos for simplified protection without additional burden on IT or security teams. Optiv’s expert-led cyber health checks uncover existing gaps and provide actionable insights into vulnerabilities. By implementing the F5 Distributed Cloud Services solution, businesses can dynamically protect apps and APIs across clouds, data centers, and the edge — all from a single SaaS platform. The result? Trusted protection and management that keep critical digital services available and performing at their best:

 

  • Risk identification: Quickly identify security risks and gaps with recommended areas of improvement.
  • Centralized protection: Generate and enforce security policies for consistent configuration, governance and management across apps and APIs, including API discovery.
  • Attack mitigation: Safeguard apps and APIs from sophisticated threats, including OWASP Top 10 threats, malicious bots, DDoS, zero day and more.
  • Tool rationalization: Reduce tool sprawl and provide a common security infrastructure that works across a hybrid cloud environment.

 

Learn More
Ready to defend your digital identity? Check out https://www.optiv.com/partners/f5 and see why Optiv and F5 are your trusted partners to drive application security in the new hybrid and multi-cloud world.

 

Sources:


Leif Rasmussen
Senior Solutions Engineer, North America Channel | F5
With nearly 40 years in the IT industry, Rasmussen’s experience spans many areas, from software development and system analysis to networking and security. He has supported application delivery and security solutions for the past 20 years, the last 15 of those with F5. In his roles as field systems engineer and channel engineer, Rasmussen developed training across products and software releases for both F5 partners and F5 engineers.

Optiv Security: Secure greatness.®

Optiv is the cyber advisory and solutions leader, delivering strategic and technical expertise to nearly 6,000 companies across every major industry. We partner with organizations to advise, deploy and operate complete cybersecurity programs from strategy and managed security services to risk, integration and technology solutions. With clients at the center of our unmatched ecosystem of people, products, partners and programs, we accelerate business progress like no other company can. At Optiv, we manage cyber risk so you can secure your full potential. For more information, visit www.optiv.com.