Why the Public Cloud Is More Secure Than Legacy Data Centers

While some technologists have raised concerns about cloud security, others staunchly contend that the benefits of public cloud outweigh the drawbacks since cyber controls can be applied much earlier in the application development life cycle.

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Palo Alto Networks founder and Chief Technology Officer Nir Zuk said development procedures in traditional data centers are “a complete mess” since users can deploy and run applications however they want. But conversely, in the cloud, DevOps engineers have the opportunity to identify security vulnerabilities in each stage before runtime including the coding, integration and deployment phases, Zuk said (see: Palo Alto Founder Nir Zuk on Making the SOC More Autonomous).

“The information security people responsible for securing the cloud need to have more understanding of coding, how applications are being deployed and, especially, what it means to find a vulnerability in the code,” Zuk said. “It means they have to look at much wider infrastructure – not just the runtime infrastructure but what comes before that.”

In this video interview with Information Security Media Group, Zuk also discussed:

• Why DevOps engineers are being asked to do more around security;
• How cloud migration has created new supply chain security challenges;
• Benefits and roadblocks to delivering security in multiple public clouds.

Prior to co-founding Palo Alto Networks in 2005, Zuk was CTO at NetScreen Technologies, which was acquired by Juniper Networks in 2004. He previously served as co-founder and CTO at OneSecure, a pioneer in intrusion prevention and detection appliances. Zuk was also a principal engineer at Check Point Software Technologies and was one of the developers of stateful inspection technology.