The new offering, the first from Kaspersky Lab to provide public cloud protection, will start with support for the AWS and Azure clouds.
Endpoint security vendor Kaspersky Lab has filled a gap in its portfolio with the introduction of Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud Security. It’s the first Kaspersky offering to provide protection in the public cloud, as part of a hybrid solution that also protects private clouds and physical and virtual data centre environments. The announcement was made at the RSA 2018 Conference.
“The challenge that we are trying to confront is that many potential customers are moving to the cloud and making their environment very heterogeneous,” said Rob Cataldo, VP of enterprise sales at Kaspersky Lab North America. “The introduction of the Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud security solution will take our same anti-malware technology with its machine learning capabilities and early detection abilities and extend it to heterogeneous environments. Now whether in the physical or virtual data centre, or in the public or private cloud, we have centralized management and visibility across a heterogeneous infrastructure with unified management.”
Kaspersky Lab was not able to protect assets in the public cloud previously.
“We did not have this capability before,” Cataldo said. “Before this, a Kaspersky customer would be limited to protecting their physical or virtual assets in their own premises or a private cloud.”
With this new offering, Kaspersky Lab takes the approach that defense against advanced cyberthreats in multi-cloud environments requires a co-ordinated strategy covering all potential assets.
“One of the deficiencies in the industry has been that when organizations have gone to the cloud, the thought has always been that the third-party cloud providers could be relied on for cloud security,” Cataldo said. “Cloud providers are focused on the security of the cloud itself – not on the workspaces and the data of the individual users within the cloud. Customers can’t rely on that native cloud security.”
Out of the gate, the Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud provides API-based integration with both the AWS and Azure cloud platforms.
“The functionality on both these clouds is exactly the same,” Cataldo said. “There are plans to expand this with other IaaS and PaaS providers, but we aren’t identifying the vendors involved just yet.”
Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud has the same assets as Kaspersky’s traditional portfolio, including unified orchestration, machine learning-assisted runtime protection., exploit prevention, vulnerability assessment, automated patch management, and threat intelligence to defend against new threats.
Management in all environments is provided by a single cloud-integrated security orchestration console, which provides full visibility and manageability across the entire hybrid cloud environment.
Kaspersky has said that the new offering is suitable for businesses of all sizes, although Cataldo indicated that the mid-market to the enterprise will be the true sweet spot for this.
“We expect to see adoption right away in the midmarket and large enterprises,” he stated. “We also think that there will be some adoption ithin the SMB and even small business in the future. Most small businesses won’t have a hybrid cloud approach, since they tend to be all or nothing where the cloud is concerned. But there are some pockets within the SMB who will come to see the value of this.”
Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud Security is available now.
