Cloud Network Security Assurance

Eliminate Uncertainty and Identify Gaps

In a constant battle between evolving malicious technics and protective measures, the defense often falls behind. As business-critical applications are moving to the cloud, organizations start to realize value of network detection and response (NDR) in addition to traditional cloud security controls.

When both protective and monitoring measures in place, is it possible to identify gaps in their readiness to encounter real-life threats, without waiting for one to occur?

With Keysight Threat Simulator, security teams can safely exercise cloud security defenses by emulating the entire cyber kill chain — phishing, user behavior, malware transmission, infection, command and control, and lateral movement.

Make Smarter Choices of Security Components

Cloud provides instant access to a whole range of security components from various vendors and open-source community. Combined with Pay-as-You-Go model, decisions which options to use become more operational to cope with evolving threat landscape.

It is criteria organizations use for selecting or changing the components that remain strategic.

Best strategies define goals to track execution, with understanding if trusted data can be obtained to make them measurable.

This is why Threat Simulator enables customers to build threat assessments relevant to their risk profile and measure actual security posture against it. Now enterprises are empowered to compare an impact of selected cloud security architecture and its components to the strategic goals.

Control Drift in Efficacy Over Time

Threat landscape is never static. Neither are security defenses. New cyber-attacks are constantly emerging, and misconfigurations are rampant. Traditionally, red/blue teaming and penetration testing are used to maintain readiness and identify weak spots. While these exercises bring high value, they cannot be applied as a daily operational routine.

To scale security exercise practices, an automated attack simulation process with built-in incident reporting loop is required.

Boasting turnkey integrations with leading network security tool vendors — including IBM, Splunk, Check Point, Cisco, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Juniper, and more — Threat Simulator helps your tools work smarter, not harder. Bidirectional communication ensures that your SIEM tools can quickly distinguish simulated cyber security threats from the real thing, while end-to-end validation makes it easy to manage and measure the effectiveness of your infrastructure.

Understand Capabilities of Each Component

Each layer of network defenses in the cloud has its own limits. Among them are throughput, packet and session rate, time to detect failure, time to deploy. Often, getting closer to the limits degrades quality of service due to increased latency or packet loss. Understanding these boundaries is critical for delivering excellent customer experience, high security resiliency and uptime.

Keysight enables organizations to stress test and characterize performance of individual network and security functions under mixes of realistic application traffic, combined with malicious activity like exploits, DDoS, malware payloads, command and control communications.

Fine-Tune Security Efficacy for Performance

Security vendors aim for delivering optimal protection for a wide range of applications and environments with acceptable performance. When a customer makes configuration changes to improve defenses in known weak areas of their infrastructure, actual performance of a security component might degrade below critical threshold.

To strike right balance between security and performance, security architects should leverage deep knowledge of application risk profiles in combination with measuring impact of configuration changes.

By using load generation tools from Keysight, customers can emulate realistic application traffic closely matching their application behavior, with granular control over types of injected malicious activity. This enables organizations to better mitigate security risks while keeping confidence in performance and user experience.

Validate and Compare Each Layer to Eliminate Weaknesses

As security architects design layered network defenses, each individual layer is built to compensate for the weaknesses of another. Can they be sure there is no weak spots that overlap between different components? Ad-hoc, manual testing methods lack coverage needed for such assurance.

By using Keysight capabilities to repeat the same sets of attacks from an extensive library over different types of security components, and compare which attacks passed unnoticed, those overlaps can be spotted and eliminated.

When reliably selected security functions are aligned to provide depth of protection, trust to the system could be finally established.