The protection of Brazil’s digital economy is being led by the next generation of data centre security solutions. As the data explosion takes shape, these solutions support the heterogeneous environments that exist today. André Kupfer, LATAM Sales Engineering Leader, Hillstone, says the Cloud Workload Protection Program (CWPP) is a fundamental achievement for Brazil, and will encourage and secure further growth in 2024.
The Brazilian digital economy increasingly runs in the multi-cloud environment. This increases the challenge of managing and securing the data centre, the physical foundation of the cloud. An IDC study released in February 2024 indicates that cloud consumption in Brazil will generate revenues in the amount of US$1.5 billion in 2024.
The cloud is not an abstract entity: private and public data centres of all sizes and infinite segments, technologies and applications are responsible for delivering the services that companies and people need.
As much as they have different profiles, data centres are equal in the search for maximum resilience.
A 2022 Uptime Institute study shows that among 1,000 global data centre managers surveyed, 25% said they had suffered losses of more than US$1 million from downtime in 2021.
The focus of cybercriminals is to identify a vulnerability of a particular device or application and, from there, move laterally, or East-West, until it gains dominance over other segments of the data centre and triggers ransomware actions with immense destructive power.
Above all, what affects the data centre affects the multi-cloud world and the digital processes that support people’s lives.
In this hyper-distributed and complex universe, there is no more room for security solutions focused on perimeter protection. Those who still follow this model have no visibility into the threats focused on the complex and micro-segmented virtual world that makes up the modern data centre.
Aware of this fact, Gartner has developed a tailor-made discipline to increase the resilience of increasingly complex, heterogeneous and segmented data centres. This is the Cloud Workload Protection Program (CWPP) – a cloud load protection platform.
As each data centre is a patchwork quilt with different generations of networks, systems and applications being processed, CWPP seeks to be a response to this situation.
In a multi-cloud, workloads can be distributed across a variety of virtualised environments. Each segment represents a specific workload. Workloads can have data stored in different physical locations, which is very common in data centres and hybrid networks. The workload is essentially the software, processes and resources required to perform the data processing work.
An organisation’s accounting department has a workload that is likely separate from the workload of the sales department. Production has a separate workload to itself, and all of these workloads need to be secure. According to the organisation’s business rule, these payloads often need to interact with each other as well.
In the CWPP model, the protection of the workload processed in the data centre spans virtual machines, containers and serverless devices in both public and private clouds.
CWPPs solutions provide 24×7 visibility and control over this entire universe, regardless of the location of the data centre.
Gartner’s recommended strategy ensures consolidated protection and visualisation of all data centres, wherever they are deployed.
The features of microsegmentation of CWPP platforms, in particular, allow security teams to define specific areas of the data centre and then establish security policies to protect them. You can go from the whole to a single virtual machine, container or specific workload. The goal is to prevent cross-client access by unauthorised users or external intrusion attempts.
The next generation of data centre security solutions are built to support the explosion of data running in heterogeneous environments that exists today.
By 2025, according to a study by TechTarget, humanity’s collective data will reach the 175-zettabyte mark. It is such a magnitude that only cybersecurity platforms that deeply exploit AI and ML resources can act in a predictive and fully automated way to preserve the data centre from the action of digital gangs.
CWPP platforms use AI and ML to perform the ‘matching’ between data centre workloads and the services that will be effectively delivered to companies and people using multi-cloud environments with maximum performance and security.
At the end of the day, what arrives for the user is the digital service (an application); up to this point, however, thousands or millions of virtual workloads are processed 24×7.
The CWPP platform processes data in containers or microservices in order to simultaneously identify and block threats and deliver to the Brazilian digital economy the apps responsible for making business run.
It’s a complex mission: today everything is software, everything is application. The data centre exists to support secure, high-performance application processing.
In this context, CWPP platforms act as a complete little computer, using AI and ML to detect vulnerabilities. It’s easier to instantly take security actions to protect the workloads that underpin the application.
The CWPP discipline adds resiliency to the data centre that acts as the foundation of multi-cloud. It is a fundamental achievement for Brazil, which needs a secure and high-performing digital economy to continue growing in 2024.
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