Proactive Performance and Security Assessment in Public Clouds

Cloud adoption underpins most of new emerging technology disruptions occurring due to its resiliency, flexibility, speed, and scalability. Shared or public cloud continues to be the largest and fastest increasing segment for the whole cloud market. IDC forecasts worldwide “whole Cloud” spending to reach $1.3 trillion by 2025 while sustaining a CAGR of 16.9%. Gartner predicts worldwide public cloud end-user spending to reach nearly $500 billion in 2022 and to reach nearly 600 billion in 2023.

At the same time, organization leaders understand that cloud architectures are complex and operationally very dynamic. These leaders cannot rely on traditional network performance and security assumptions, information, and claims. Also, every organization is different and has its own business critical applications and security mandates. Therefore, it becomes imperative for organizations to include proactive application performance validations and security posture assessments during and after their migrations to cloud.

Implementing proactive performance and security assessments for cloud-first strategies

Spirent test solutions add realism to proactive performance load and security posture validation with tests scenarios that are based on latest applications, attacks, and malwares.

The flexibility delivered by Spirent CyberFlood Virtual solution along with a wide range of supported EC2 instance types goes beyond on-prem deployments and is also available in public cloud including AWS. Furthermore, it is customizable to meet organization objectives and use cases.

This capability helps to extend the depth and breadth of cloud assessment that organizations would need as part of their cloud-first strategy for performance and security validations.

Security validation use cases in action

An example of such use cases in AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) would be establishing intra-VPC back-to-back baseline testing as well as with third-party cloud-based traffic inspection solutions such as virtual firewalls. Back-to-back baseline testing would establish assessments for intra-VPC default settings and would be a good place to start before more and more services are added as part of cloud migration.

The intra-VPC virtual firewall assessment can be used to validate security policies and posture of its inspection engines and furthermore it would allow assessments of its performance under load (with malicious and non-malicious traffic).

The following diagrams illustrate these use cases.

See CyberFlood intra-VPC back-to-back baseline assessment in action:

• Deployment tips: https://youtu.be/xa5zlZ6HjGo

• Validation tips: https://youtu.be/j87FgeS3fdE

You might also find the following demonstrations of CyberFlood intra-VPC virtual firewall assessment helpful:

• Deployment tips: https://youtu.be/FklvzdIkGMo

• Validation tips: https://youtu.be/4iEIv2QsoPQ

Cybersecurity threats keep evolving and networks continue to grow more distributed and harder to protect. Adopting a posture of continuous assessment and implementing ongoing performance and security testing helps with find the right balance by pre-emptively measuring the effects of network and security changes against a baseline to understand their impact before they adversely affect applications and user’s QoE (Quality of Experience).

Adopting a proactive cybersecurity strategy will not only keep users happy and safe but will enable smarter investments in security solutions overall by providing insights into what is required of them ahead of time.

Baseline and virtual firewall testing are an essential part of cloud migration validation. These and other CyberFlood capabilities cover a wide range of complex public cloud use cases which would enable industry and organization leaders to embark on their cloud journey with more confidence and to overcome emerging cloud innovation as well as security challenges.

Learn how Spirent security testing solutions can help assess the performance and security strength of your organization’s public cloud network.