Automate security in increasingly complex hybrid environments

As new technologies and infrastructure such as virtualization, cloud, and containers are introduced into enterprise networks to make them more efficient, these hybrid environments are becoming more complex—potentially adding risks and security vulnerabilities.

According to the Information Security Forum’s Global Security Threat Outlook for 2019, one of the biggest IT trends to watch this year is the increasing sophistication of cybercrime and ransomware. And even as the volume of ransomware attacks is dropping, cybercriminals are finding new, more potent ways to be disruptive. An article in TechRepublic points to cryptojacking malware, which enables someone to hijack another’s hardware without permission to mine cryptocurrency, as a growing threat for enterprise networks.

To more effectively mitigate these risks, organizations could invest in automation as a component of their security plans. That’s because it takes time to investigate and resolve issues, in addition to applying controlled remediations across bare metal, virtualized systems, and cloud environments — both private and public — all while documenting changes.

Creating and maintaining a more secure foundation for systems running customer portals, operations and/or business support systems, and a range of virtual network functions in distributed environments is important to telecommunications service providers as they digitally transform their businesses. Automation can simplify the effort and allow them to execute at the scale they need. Plus it can free up valuable security professionals to focus on more critical security tasks that require human intervention.