CAVIRIN SYSTEMS: Pioneering Security in the Hybird Cloud
DR.Rao Papoli, CEO and Chairman
Organizations around the world today are being faced with the overwhelming pressure to rapidly innovate, increase their agility, automate processes to appease customers and continue their financial growth, so as to stay abreast of the growing competition. The transition to a 'digital business’ by implementing Cloud services is thus no longer a choice and has become absolutely imperative for the continued survival of any enterprise. Among the plethora of Cloud platforms, services, choice of providers and types of instances available today, the Hybrid Cloud has emerged as a sought-after option, as it allows for the movement of workloads between private and public Clouds according to changing computing needs and costs, thereby giving businesses more data-deployment options and flexibility.
However, a shift to the hybrid environment is also accompanied by security concerns with respect to compliance, lack of encryption, poor SLAs, data redundancy, data privacy, and visibility. Corroborating this fact are studies from Crowd Research, which show Cloud Security to be a major challenge for 90 percent of Cybersecurity professionals, with data loss and leakage(67%), data privacy(61%)and confidentiality breaches (53%), topping the list of concerns. As a result, identifying and verifying these concerns as well as the areas of risk has become a fundamental prerequisite for mitigating action, but given the complexity of Hybrid Cloud environments, this has become an even more challenging task for enterprises. Perfectly understanding these challenges and impediments that arise while operating in hybrid environments, Santa Clara, CA headquartered Cavirin Systems steps forward to help organizations address them by providing capabilities for real-time Risk & Cybersecurity Posture Management, Continuous Compliance and Integration of Security into DevOps.
Since its inception in 2012, Cavirin’s key focus has been on Hybrid Cloud Security, where the company provides capabilities to assess and then remediate gaps in workloads, both on-premise and across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Cavirin also helps organizations protect their digital assets across the enterprise hybrid cloud by providing CyberPosture Intelligence. As the only company providing Cyber Security risk posture and compliance for the enterprise hybrid cloud today, Cavirin addresses major Hybrid Cloud security concerns and helps enterprises maintain their ‘golden security posture’ via continuous visibility, automated scoring against the widest set of industry best practices, regulations, benchmarks, and remediation leveraging predictive analytics, and integrating security into the DevOps cycle. Through these efforts, Cavirin has been able to encourage greater adoption of hybrid cloud architectures in the market. “On the complexity front, our goal is to greatly simplify the deployment of a solution that offers the required visibility into risk posture within the hybrid cloud,” affirm Dr.RaoPapolu,CEO and Chairman, Cavirin Systems.
Facilitating Greater Risk-Posture Visibility and Security Remediation
While traditional Cloud Security solutions provide siloed, delayed visibility, and require manual security remediation and testing which is not well suited for the flexibility and velocity that the hybrid cloud model offers, Cavirin’s CyberPosture Intelligence for the Hybrid Cloud eliminates these limitations and removes the barrier to the cloud with three important courses of action Continuous Risk and Cybersecurity Posture Management, Integration of Security into DevOps and Continuous Compliance Management.
Cybersecurity Posture Management provides visibility and actionable intelligence to the CISOs and other stakeholders across the hybrid environment with a central 'CISO Dashboard' which depicts exactly what organizations have at each moment and where they are located. This includes cloud account security posture via real-time monitoring such as AWS CloudTrail, as well as virtual machines and container instances via scheduled assessments. The goal is to 'harden' both the OSs as well as the cloud infrastructure against threats, both external and internal. Integration of Security into DevOps bridges the gap between DevOps and SecOps with capabilities that automatically inject security into the DevOps cycle - development, staging, and deployment - through CI/CD integration. Cavirin also facilitates Continuous Compliance Management which serves to remove security compliance as a barrier to cloud adoption through automation and customization via the broadest set of customizable frameworks, benchmarks, and guidelines.
When it comes to remediating the identified security gaps, Cavirin’s solution includes a streamlined configuration and an intuitive wizard-based work flow that minimizes the amount of training required while also providing the operator with prioritized guidance based on bigdata analytics, and a plan to target CyberPosture report. One-button auto-remediation supports both AWS via Lambda functions and Google Cloud via functions, while Ansible Playbooks offer the same for OSs, both on-premise and in the cloud. This helps close the loop between monitoring and change management. Moreover, believing that a solution must scale and integrate with existing security solutions to offer an acceptable ROI, the company has invested efforts in developing a microservices architecture that linearly scales to the largest deployments, as well as an API-first approach that enables interoperability.
Moreover, the solution is designed to secure both the public cloud control plane as well as target hybrid cloud workloads(servers),on-premise, within the public cloud, and within containers. “The essence of CyberPosture is in its ability to act as a real-time score of overall Cybersecurity risk and
compliance strength. The value ranges from 0 to 100, with 100 being the best, and takes into account asset ‘CIA’, confidentiality, integrity, and availability, as well as customizations. We also have the concept of a ‘golden posture’ which is the score to which the organization aspires, based on their risk analysis,” explains Rao. The resulting CyberPosture score thus permits organizations to compare their current security posture against the desired ‘golden posture’ and immediately takes corrective action if required.
"The essence of cyberposture is in its ability to act as a real time score of over all cybersecurity risk and compliance strength"
When it comes to remediating the identified security gaps, Cavirin’s solution includes a streamlined configuration and an intuitive wizard-based work flow that minimizes the amount of training required while also providing the operator with prioritized guidance based on bigdata analytics, and a plan to target CyberPosture report. One-button auto-remediation supports both AWS via Lambda functions and Google Cloud via functions, while Ansible Playbooks offer the same for OSs, both on-premise and in the cloud. This helps close the loop between monitoring and change management. Moreover, believing that a solution must scale and integrate with existing security solutions to offer an acceptable ROI, the company has invested efforts in developing a microservices architecture that linearly scales to the largest deployments, as well as an API-first approach that enables interoperability.
“Cavirin is the only company today which uniquely demonstrates OS hardening for Data Center Infrastructure as well as Cloud Infrastructure. One button remediation also demonstrates the analysis of remediation through AWS Guard duty and functions for cloud account level as well as OS through Ansible integration. Moreover, the security score card that we generate through analyzing various security features allows our customers a clear understanding of their security environment based on the score and helps them prioritize where to focus on their security gaps,” adds Rao.
Supporting Cloud Migration and Multi-Cloud Adoption
Another key area of focus for Cavirin Systems is the mega-trend of cloud migration. With the growing digitalization phenomenon, improper infrastructure, lack of planning, digital illiteracy and insecure devices giving rise to more cyber security challenges,vulnerabilities, and attacks, organizations today are many times challenged to effectively secure their Cloud Migration and Multi-cloud Adoption. Cavirin steps forward to address this concern with its CyberPosture Intelligence solution to help organizations gain better visibility into their hybrid cloud deployments. One of the most important courses of action undertaken by the company is to set in place the automation of technical controls on-premise and within the public cloud, to act as a bulwark when the inevitable employee-driven breaches occur, either unintentional or malicious. This capability offers organizations’IT departments a real business advantage in lowering the probability of a breach, while also eliminating costs and reputation damage.
Furthermore, another key requisite in the Cloud Migration process is Security Maintenance and Management to ensure the compliance of stored and migrated data. Cavirin employs its software platform to meet this need and eliminate the regulations and data governance challenges of Cloud adoption.To ensure that an organization’s workloads stay compliant when moving to the cloud, the company deploys its CyberPosture Intelligence solution to continually evaluate thesecurity posture of the different workloads, which then informs IT of any security gaps. When performed for multi-cloud deployments, this spans across multiple providers while also offering guidance to normalize any differences in how assessments take place. Cavirin’s CyberPosture scoring thus provides the common ground that CISOs require, thereby ensuring seamless and secure Cloud Migration and Multi-Cloud adoption.
Future Engagements
Having introduced advanced security and risk management strategies for the Cloud in a period spanning across six years, Cavirin Systems has emerged as a distinguished solution provider in the Cybersecurity realm and is widely commended for its valuable contributions to this domain. Asthe only providerof CyberPosture Intelligence in the industry, the company has also now introduced auto-remediation across AWS. Cavirin also intends to offer the same for Azure, as well as bring a SaaSbased version of this offering for its customers with less stringent security requirements. Furthermore, believing the industry to be in the early days of a decade-long transition to a true hybrid infrastructure, Cavirin is convinced that the enterprises of the future will have the ability to deploy and secure their workloads across any public cloud, or on-premise environment, and operate them as one. “Cloud security is not getting any simpler, even with vendor consolidation, and enterprises are hard pressed to understand the implications of the various service offerings and security capabilities across multiple clouds. Our strategy is to create simplicity out of perceived chaos,” signs off Rao.
Cavirin's Evolution Through The Years
Having forayed into Cybersecurity six years ago, Cavirin began its journey in 2012 with its first product that offered configuration guidance for physical(on-premise) networks. By 2014, having understood that the Cloud was becoming the new growth area, the company pivoted to the launch of a virtual appliance, ARAP- its first virtual appliance for assessment and remediation, which was also focused on AWS. Cavirin also then became the first AWS partner to achieve security competency. The company then set out to develop a new platform while leveraging its key IP in deep discovery and target asset(workload) assessment. In alignment with its vision, Cavirin’s next evolution occurred in 2017 with the development of its current offering. The new solution, based on microservices, wizard-based operation, an API-first architecture, and the ability to support live monitoring, provided the foundation for the company’s Cyber Posture Intelligence. Being cloud-agnostic, this solution is quick to implement, scales via micro-services, and combines security, compliance, and risk to meet evolving hybrid cloud security needs.
"The essence of cyberposture is in its ability to act as a real time score of over all cybersecurity risk and compliance strength"
When it comes to remediating the identified security gaps, Cavirin’s solution includes a streamlined configuration and an intuitive wizard-based work flow that minimizes the amount of training required while also providing the operator with prioritized guidance based on bigdata analytics, and a plan to target CyberPosture report. One-button auto-remediation supports both AWS via Lambda functions and Google Cloud via functions, while Ansible Playbooks offer the same for OSs, both on-premise and in the cloud. This helps close the loop between monitoring and change management. Moreover, believing that a solution must scale and integrate with existing security solutions to offer an acceptable ROI, the company has invested efforts in developing a microservices architecture that linearly scales to the largest deployments, as well as an API-first approach that enables interoperability.
“Cavirin is the only company today which uniquely demonstrates OS hardening for Data Center Infrastructure as well as Cloud Infrastructure. One button remediation also demonstrates the analysis of remediation through AWS Guard duty and functions for cloud account level as well as OS through Ansible integration. Moreover, the security score card that we generate through analyzing various security features allows our customers a clear understanding of their security environment based on the score and helps them prioritize where to focus on their security gaps,” adds Rao.
Supporting Cloud Migration and Multi-Cloud Adoption
Another key area of focus for Cavirin Systems is the mega-trend of cloud migration. With the growing digitalization phenomenon, improper infrastructure, lack of planning, digital illiteracy and insecure devices giving rise to more cyber security challenges,vulnerabilities, and attacks, organizations today are many times challenged to effectively secure their Cloud Migration and Multi-cloud Adoption. Cavirin steps forward to address this concern with its CyberPosture Intelligence solution to help organizations gain better visibility into their hybrid cloud deployments. One of the most important courses of action undertaken by the company is to set in place the automation of technical controls on-premise and within the public cloud, to act as a bulwark when the inevitable employee-driven breaches occur, either unintentional or malicious. This capability offers organizations’IT departments a real business advantage in lowering the probability of a breach, while also eliminating costs and reputation damage.
Furthermore, another key requisite in the Cloud Migration process is Security Maintenance and Management to ensure the compliance of stored and migrated data. Cavirin employs its software platform to meet this need and eliminate the regulations and data governance challenges of Cloud adoption.To ensure that an organization’s workloads stay compliant when moving to the cloud, the company deploys its CyberPosture Intelligence solution to continually evaluate thesecurity posture of the different workloads, which then informs IT of any security gaps. When performed for multi-cloud deployments, this spans across multiple providers while also offering guidance to normalize any differences in how assessments take place. Cavirin’s CyberPosture scoring thus provides the common ground that CISOs require, thereby ensuring seamless and secure Cloud Migration and Multi-Cloud adoption.
Future Engagements
Having introduced advanced security and risk management strategies for the Cloud in a period spanning across six years, Cavirin Systems has emerged as a distinguished solution provider in the Cybersecurity realm and is widely commended for its valuable contributions to this domain. Asthe only providerof CyberPosture Intelligence in the industry, the company has also now introduced auto-remediation across AWS. Cavirin also intends to offer the same for Azure, as well as bring a SaaSbased version of this offering for its customers with less stringent security requirements. Furthermore, believing the industry to be in the early days of a decade-long transition to a true hybrid infrastructure, Cavirin is convinced that the enterprises of the future will have the ability to deploy and secure their workloads across any public cloud, or on-premise environment, and operate them as one. “Cloud security is not getting any simpler, even with vendor consolidation, and enterprises are hard pressed to understand the implications of the various service offerings and security capabilities across multiple clouds. Our strategy is to create simplicity out of perceived chaos,” signs off Rao.
Cavirin's Evolution Through The Years
Having forayed into Cybersecurity six years ago, Cavirin began its journey in 2012 with its first product that offered configuration guidance for physical(on-premise) networks. By 2014, having understood that the Cloud was becoming the new growth area, the company pivoted to the launch of a virtual appliance, ARAP- its first virtual appliance for assessment and remediation, which was also focused on AWS. Cavirin also then became the first AWS partner to achieve security competency. The company then set out to develop a new platform while leveraging its key IP in deep discovery and target asset(workload) assessment. In alignment with its vision, Cavirin’s next evolution occurred in 2017 with the development of its current offering. The new solution, based on microservices, wizard-based operation, an API-first architecture, and the ability to support live monitoring, provided the foundation for the company’s Cyber Posture Intelligence. Being cloud-agnostic, this solution is quick to implement, scales via micro-services, and combines security, compliance, and risk to meet evolving hybrid cloud security needs.
