RSAC Fireside Chat: Dealing with the return of computing workloads to on-premises datacenters

By Byron V. Acohido

A cloud migration backlash, of sorts, is playing out.

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Many companies, indeed, are shifting to cloud-hosted IT infrastructure, and beyond that, to containerization and serverless architectures.

However, a “back-migration,” as Michiel De Lepper, global enablement manager, at London-based Runecast, puts it, is also ramping up. This is because certain workloads are proving to be too costly to run in the cloud — resource-intensive AI modeling being the prime example.

I had an evocative discussion about this with De Lepper and his colleague, Markus Strauss, Runecast product leader, at RSA Conference 2023. For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen. The duo outlined how a nascent discipline — Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) – factors in.

Guest experts: Markus Strauss, Product Leader, and Michiel De Lepper, Global Enablement Manager, Runecast

CNAPP solutions focus on monitoring and enforcing security policies on workloads and in applications – during runtime. This is no small feat in an operating environment of co-mingled on-prem and cloud-hosted resources.

Runecast, for instance, takes a proactive approach to risk-based vulnerability management, configuration management, container security, compliance auditing, remediation and reporting.

This helps with compliance, at one level, but also continually improves detection of any soft spots and/or active attacks, while also paving the road to automated  remediation.

“It’s no longer about creating shields,” De Lepper told me, “Instead, we’re helping our customers plug all the gaps the bad guys can use.”

CNAPP solutions show promise for helping overcome the complexities of fragmented defenses; will they ultimately lead to more resilient business networks?  I’ll keep watch and keep reporting.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.


(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)

June 6th, 2023