A data-centered approach to securing the future of business

Data is not only transforming business, it’s overwhelming it. From the constant proliferation of mobile devices; the relentless push-and-pull of social networks; and the unimagined computing access via the cloud, few trends will have as big an impact in transforming the way a business operates or competes in the market.

Lacework sees this broader trend having far-reaching implications for how applications are built, how data is architected and secured, and how entire industries build and rebuild core business processes and operations. That’s why today we are excited to introduce new innovations to the Lacework data-driven cloud security platform, in parallel with the acquisition of Infrastructure as Code Company, Soluble. With today’s announcement, Lacework brings to bear the full spectrum of Developer Security Operations (DevSecOps) capabilities customers need to integrate security into the fabric of their innovation engines, ultimately driving their business forward.

Security that enables business success

Our belief is cloud security is a data problem, and to solve it, businesses need to rethink their overall approach to security. In the cloud, for example, teams are dealing with enormous scale; constantly evolving technologies and changes to those technologies; and adaptive/responsive infrastructure. All of this produces a massive amount of data that can be difficult to effectively interpret at scale. And when you combine these complexities with a shortage of security talent – by some reports a gap of nearly 3.5 million cybersecurity specialists – traditional security approaches can’t keep pace with identifying what’s bad.

This is why today’s announcement focuses on solving the data problem, and helping businesses unlock benefits such as:

• Product managers can design more innovative services and accelerate time to market by days or months, instead of trying to sort through a never-ending list of vulnerabilities.
• Developers can build with confidence, knowing vulnerabilities will be addressed before code is in production, reducing the risk of misconfigurations.
• Security teams can reduce the risk of successful attacks on both workloads and cloud accounts and enable other teams with the power to address issues sooner. Plus, using the same platform they can detect unknown threats and provide greater visibility across cloud environments.
• Compliance can ace their audits knowing all information has been aggregated into one place to automate policy changes and easily report compliance.

New innovations to detect vulnerabilities earlier
To help businesses better secure their apps and data in the cloud, today’s news introduces new innovation in a critical area: detection and remediation of vulnerabilities earlier in the development process. This is important because once code is running in production, the cost and time it takes to fix vulnerabilities increases exponentially. By helping developers address vulnerabilities before code is deployed in production and remediate container vulnerabilities based on true risk, Lacework customers can prevent attacks, saving time and money.

For example, new updates announced today enable organizations to:

• Prevent vulnerabilities at build time. With the new inline vulnerability scanner, developers can scan images for vulnerabilities before the image is checked into their registry — proactively finding and fixing issues without involvement from the security team. The inline scanner performs low-latency, fast scans within seconds, and puts security directly in the hands of developers.
• Block vulnerable containers before runtime. The new Lacework admission controller for Kubernetes gives you the ability to set and enforce security standards for container images before they’re deployed in production. This means that container images that fail to meet security standards are automatically blocked, or give you the flexibility to elevate it as an alert for quick investigation. This helps compliance, too, because it’s easy to trace specific end user actions for forensic and compliance purposes.
• Prioritize fixes in runtime with actionable risk scoring. The new extensible, entity-based risk model delivers a unique remediation priority list for each customer environment. This allows developers to better prioritize remediation tasks and improve their security posture sooner, while also allowing the entire team to track their risk trends over time.
• Eliminate container vulnerability blind spots. New non-OS package support provides teams better visibility into vulnerabilities associated with language libraries (Java, Python, Node, PHP, etc.), distroless images, and local image scans. This eliminates security blind spots associated with container images with non-OS package libraries and enables the DevOps team to further reduce attack surface.
• Embrace Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF). While eliminating those container vulnerability blind spots, security can now use the same security platform to gain a better view into containers at runtime. Lacework uses a combined agentless and agent-based approach to get the right level of data in the most effective way, from build time through runtime. With our new support of eBPF, integrated directly into the Lacework agent, we safely and efficiently extend the capabilities of the kernel without requiring teams to make changes to the kernel. Lacework is one of the first cloud security providers to support eBPF and the ability to monitor processes inside containers, catch short-lived connections, and have better attribution.

Security is everyone’s responsibility

Todays’ news helps address the lack of visibility and true behavioral context around vulnerabilities, which can create friction and even a philosophical divide between product development and security teams. This cultural divide has become the achilles heel of the cloud security industry. Without total clarity into the overwhelming and oftentimes inaccurate list of security issues generated from rules based approaches, it can be impossible to determine what needs to be prioritized, fixed, and redeployed–chaos ensues and organizations are stifled in their ability to introduce new innovations to market quickly.

“Ultimately, security is everybody’s responsibility,” says Bren Biggs, VP of DevOps and Cybersecurity at Hypergiant. “It’s our job to make sure that developers are able to push code quickly and that they’re able to see and remediate vulnerabilities early on. The Lacework platform doesn’t change the developer workflow, but it gives us far more visibility into what’s happening.”

Briggs has been thrilled with Lacework’s impact on assisting developers. “One of the major outcomes that I didn’t anticipate, but am definitely thrilled to see, is how we’re able to democratize access to the security event data,” he says. And with Lacework’s ability to help educate developers, Hypergiant can easily integrate security into the development process, consolidate security tools and reduce security alerts by 70%.

Find out more
Interested in learning more about how new Lacework’s innovations can help your organization leverage security as a business enabler? Join us for a webinar on Nov. 18, 2021 at 11am PT / 2pm ET or check out our press release for more information.

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