CloudPassage Botnet Service Secures the Cloud

IT Plays Catch-up with Cloud Application Security

In an ideal world, security policies would attach themselves to a particular application workload and then follow it wherever it went.

CloudPassage today is offering just that sort of capability with the extension of its security as a service platform into multiple cloud computing platforms.

According to CloudPassage CEO Carson Sweet, Halo Enterprise attaches a lightweight agent to each workload running in the cloud. That agent then streams security data back to the HaloGrid, a data analytics engine embedded in the CloudPassage service, which then alerts administrators if the security policies attached to that workload have been compromised.

With IT organizations having less control over workloads in the age of the cloud, Sweet says Halo Enterprise is intended to reduce security fears when it comes to taking advantage of lower-cost cloud computing services.

Halo Enterprise, says Sweet, also includes the ability to feed data to security information event management (SIEM) systems and governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) systems.

Sweet says the CloudPassage platform essentially operates in much the same fashion as a botnet, except that instead of monitoring malware it monitors the agents that IT organizations attach to their workloads.

As cloud computing evolves, it’s become apparent that more sophisticated approaches to managing security are required. One approach to accomplishing that is to fight fire with fire, which is essentially what CloudPassage is attempting to do by using botnet technology to work in the best interests of IT instead of against it.