To protect the possessions in your house, you lock the doors and windows. But everyone wants convenience and a contingency plan, so they give a key to the neighbors … and the cleaners … and your family … just in case.
That’s kind of like the cloud today. You’re putting your data there, but for the sake of convenience – indeed, in order to do business – you give lots of people access to it: your hosting provider, your employees, your partners, your customers.
For enterprises that have turned to firewalls for perimeter security, the cloud is a whole new landscape. Instead of locking the doors and windows, as it were, enterprises have to think more about two things: first, protecting the most critical data (the kind of stuff you put in a safe in your house), and second, complying with regulations about protecting that data (especially customer and personally identifiable data).
Here at Infoblox, we’ve been thinking a lot about protecting data in the enterprise and in the cloud. We’re especially focusing on analytics and machine learning to protect against DNS tunneling for data exfiltration (the process of surreptitiously stealing it) and proactively preventing inadvertent access to malicious sites. Instead of figuring out how to lock more doors, which only slows down data access, we’re helping customers move toward protecting the applications and the data themselves. We’re working on our DNS tunneling techniques and advanced DNS protection to be even better at detecting exfiltration.
Simply put, we’re improving machine-learning technologies, such as detection algorithms, to provide more visibility and actionable network intelligence. We want to help customers not only identify when unauthorized IP addresses are trying to access data, but to also see patterns of activity that point to such behavior. (We also want to make sure enterprises can see when data has been left unprotected unintentionally, as it sometimes is.)
From a compliance standpoint, we’re helping CIOs and CISOs develop consistent policies that ensure they can apply the same policies for internal firewalls as they do for firewalls that protect the cloud.
To learn more about Infoblox’s data exfiltration solutions, click here.