New Azure and AWS integration announced amid increasing cyber threats

FireMon, a security automation solutions specialist, yesterday announced new integrations with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The company says the integration of the two cloud giants will help match the pace needed to protect systems from ongoing and increasing cyber threats and data breaches.

The new integrations come amid the industry trend of emerging multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

• Fast rule creation to manage cloud traffic targeting certain types of traffic, based on the protocol, ports, sources, and destinations.
• Ability to create and modify firewall rules for specific instances in the cloud.
• Capbility to configure security access rules to support migration between data centers and the cloud.
• Ability to deploy context-aware policies which automatically adapt to protect systems as required by digital enterprises.

"With our latest Microsoft Azure and AWS cloud integrations, customers can now deploy a security policy orchestration across any type of infrastructure," says FireMon vice president of technology alliances Tim Woods.

According to a recent report, 78% of organisations already use both AWS and Azure to host their infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) systems, with cloud-based threats increasing in tandem.

Whether using a cloud-first or hybrid model, all organisations eventually come across common security issues.

These organisations must meet their customers' demands for agility in performance while tackling the need to simplify, avoid human-introduced risks, and maintain compliance.

Organisations must maintain a centralised view of threat management across their environments; be able to securely deploy new applications and workloads; manage access and control systems; securely transfer and migrate data; and accomplish all of this at the speed of the cloud.

"An average enterprise has 14 IaaS and PaaS public cloud misconfigurations running simultaneously, which results in more than 2,200 incidents per month and leads to data breaches and serious security issues," says FireMon vice president of global field engineering Jeffrey Styles. 

"Enterprises need to use automated tools to help lift the burden of securing cloud initiatives from overworked security teams."

FireMon integrates with the native controls of multiple public cloud platforms to streamline security policies between cloud and data center environments.

Firewalls can be placed in a physical or virtual environment, and FireMon asserts its monitoring capabilities provide equal visibility into security policies as with physical firewalls.

• Cloud-native objects and associations in policy with VM support.
• The ability to differentiate inbound/outbound firewall and access rules.
•  Support for Application Security Groups.
•  Automation support via FireMon's Global Policy Controller for adaptive policy enforcement.
•  Deployment with support in AWS and Azure cloud marketplaces.