McAfee has announced updates to McAfee MVISION Cloud for Microsoft Azure that will help customers “Shift Left” with security to preemptively help to address compliance and risk within their cloud infrastructure.
According to the firm, with MVISION Cloud, security is pushed earlier into the DevOps process so that security professionals can catch risky configurations before they become a threat in production. This gives organisations the ability to confidently deploy applications in the cloud with greater speed and efficiency.
While Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environments provide customers with choice and flexibility, if not configured correctly, they also potentially increase the organisation’s surface area for security risks.
With the new features in McAfee MVISION Cloud for Azure, security groups can integrate policy natively into DevOps processes and toolsets to discover security issues before systems are deployed to accelerate business in the cloud. New capabilities include:
- Security Scans for Azure Resource Manager Templates: allows users to discover risky configuration issues or violations in Azure Resource Manager Templates prior to deploying resources.
- Inline integration with the tools developers use: security checks inside the DevOps pipeline through API integration with popular tools including Microsoft Git, Github, and Azure DevOps. Security Feedback is natively integrated into the build process saving time, effort, and frustration.
- Unified Cloud Security for Azure Ecosystem: allows developers to leverage Azure services knowing security will be built-in by design (IaaS/PaaS/Container services) aligning closely to the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) best practices.
- Preemptive Risk Avoidance: improves compliance with regulatory frameworks and reduces the likelihood of data loss, abuse or fines associated with improper security controls by highlighting security findings before they become security incidents.
Shifting Left gives organisations the ability to avoid common security-related issues. According to Cloud-Native: The Infrastructure-as-a-Service Adoption and Risk Report, 99 percent of IaaS misconfigurations go unnoticed. Most IaaS, PaaS, and Container configuration audit tools focus on evaluating the risk of resources that are already live. Scanning systems once they are live is important for detecting configuration drift, but it also allows risks from misconfiguration to be exposed until they are discovered and remediated. If left unfound, these issues are then recreated when the suspect templates are used to provision more systems resulting in a proliferation of real risk in large numbers of live systems. Potentially, this problem is further repeated across the many development teams in the organisation.
“Developers increasingly leverage modern DevOps tools to operate at the “speed of cloud” to help transform their organisations,” said Rajiv Gupta, senior vice president of Cloud Security, McAfee. “By integrating with the DevOps tools, McAfee MVISION Cloud for Microsoft Azure will help security teams remove the risk of systems running with unresolved misconfigurations, reduce the workload of infrastructure teams by employing a fix once at the source and give them the ability to enact and evaluate security policies from one central location without adding friction to the development teams.”
“We’re pleased to see that McAfee is helping improve how companies operate infrastructure safely in the cloud,” said Scott Woodgate, senior director, Azure Security, Microsoft Corp. “With McAfee MVISION Cloud, Microsoft security professionals can gain better visibility and control over their cloud resources and detect and respond to threats earlier in the development lifecycle. Optimally, McAfee helps customers realise the full potential of Azure services by removing security as the barrier to getting things done.”
McAfee MVISION Cloud for Microsoft Teams provides an exhaustive cloud security solution that works consistently across IaaS, PaaS, Container and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environments. It integrates quickly and seamlessly through an application programming interface (API) with the Azure infrastructure to enforce security controls that span from the IaaS/PaaS infrastructure all the way up to custom applications to help enterprises meet their security, compliance and governance requirements.
The new “Shift Left” capabilities in McAfee MVISION Cloud for Microsoft Azure are available now.
