One of the primary driving forces behind DevOps is its fluidity. There is a domino-effect that cascades from the developers who create the apps to the IT admins who deploy and administer the apps to the individuals who download and use the apps and back again. Traditional security can’t keep pace so Alert Logic created Cloud Insight—a cloud-native vulnerability and configuration management solution for cloud infrastructures running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
I’ve written previously about the continuous continuousness of DevOps. Anything and everything that used to be manual tasks on a static infrastructure is now automated to the Nth degree. “Continuous development and continuous testing lead to continuous deployment and continuous delivery, which requires continuous support. Continuous monitoring produces continuous integration and continuous change.”
All of that also means that it’s virtually impossible to keep up with the current configuration or accurately assess vulnerabilities in a constantly-changing environment. If your entire cloud infrastructure can change at the push of a button you also need to have security controls in place that are just as automated and capable of flowing with the changes and providing continuous, real-time security. Traditional security solutions simply won’t work.
Alert Logic agrees, which is why it developed Cloud Insight. Gray Hall, CEO of Alert Logic, explained in a press release announcing Cloud Insight, “Managing security while maintaining the agility of the cloud is fundamentally different than in any other environment. With Alert Logic Cloud Insight we are delivering an innovative solution that gives businesses an added layer of visibility for workloads running on AWS—actionable intelligence to identify and eliminate risk across instances and applications while not slowing the business down.”
Cloud Insight automatically tracks changes—additions, moves, deletions—within the AWS platform. It continuously identifies threats and vulnerabilities and potential exposure to risk within the dynamic environment. Alert Logic uses AWS APIs to integrate with the cloud infrastructure to detect any changes and inspect the new, change, or modified resources for vulnerabilities or configuration issues.
Cloud Insight generates a prioritized list of remediation actions so the organization knows in real-time what’s broken and what the exposure to risk is and it can focus on addressing the issues and maintaining a strong security posture rather than spinning its wheels just trying to keep up with vulnerability assessments in a fluid environment.
Terry Wise, VP of Worldwide Partner Ecosystem for AWS, said “Security-as-a-Service solutions built on AWS and designed to complement AWS-native security features enable customers to maintain the highest levels of protection while achieving the agility, elasticity, and cost savings of the AWS Cloud.”
Alert Logic Cloud Insight is pre-approved to run on AWS. You can use Cloud Insight to conduct vulnerability scans and penetration testing within AWS without any additional permission. Cloud Insight also includes customer-facing APIs that can be used to integrate with other DevOps tools, and it can be integrated into your existing DevOps pipeline.
Pricing for Alert Logic Cloud Insight is similar to the AWS pricing model. It functions on a pay-as-you-go basis based on the number of hosts or protected instances for a given day. Customers are billed $1 (USD) per instance per day. You can request a free trial of Alert Logic Cloud Insight to determine if it’s a good solution for your organization before taking the plunge.
