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Assure optimum performance and security effectiveness for cloud-based applications

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Blog - Assure optimum performance and security effectiveness for cloud-based applications

Amazon Web Services, Cloud-based sevices, CyberFlood Virtual,

aws

Currently, cloud-based services are all the rage due to agility, scalability, resiliency and cost reduction benefits that they offer to organizations providing or leveraging those services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) trusted cloud-based infrastructure has those inherent benefits which can help customers in meeting their business goals. The ultimate security and performance of cloud-based applications is based on a shared model. Security and performance of the cloud is the responsibility of the cloud provider, however an organization offering the services needs to assure security and ensure optimum performance as it relates to individual applications and its associated data within the cloud.

The advantages that Amazon puts forward for cloud-based solutions are an impressive list and they include:

  • Benefiting from massive economies of scale, optimum capacity, and increased agility

  • Reduced spending on running and maintaining data centers

  • Trading capital expense for variable expenses

  • Reaching a global audience within minutes

The above list is likely to entice any organization regardless of its size to rush transitioning or deploying their services in the public cloud. However, one has to keep in mind that as consumers of AWS infrastructure and services, organizations need to validate performance and security effectiveness of applications built on top of AWS which are being offered to end users. Regardless of how you are consuming AWS services, quantifying performance and qualifying security postures of services in AWS can help you in attaining the benefits that have been attributed to the public cloud. There are many use cases for having cloud-based security effectiveness and performance assessment and below are a few broad examples:

  1. Rolling out enterprise-wide services: Validation can be part of vendor qualification, service design/deployment or service migration

  2. Productizing cloud-based solutions: Validation of cloud-based services under realistic loads and against up-to-date threat landscape, competitive benchmarking, Customer Proof of Concept (CPoC)

  3. DevOps/QA: Ongoing verification during development lifecycle and final production.

If you are planning to rollout new enterprise-wide solutions or upgrading to the latest technology, validation can help your organization in qualifying the final cloud-based design and deployment. Furthermore, you can facilitate your decision making by qualifying components of the cloud-based solution from various vendors in relation to their datasheet claims.

Another use case would be validating quality of experience from end-user point of view under realistic load with up-to-date attacks and malware to help in productizing and launching successful cloud-based solutions. Also, your customers may ask for a demonstration of viable solutions mimicking their environment or may ask for a side-by-side benchmarking in order to make their final decision.

DevOps high velocity release of applications hinges on continuous software delivery practice where code changes are rapidly built, tested and prepared for production. By including realistic traffic loads and threats as part of testing for cloud-based applications, delivery of the software can be performed more efficiently and robustly. In DevOps teams where security is the focus of everyone (DevSecOps), having realistic security assessment is invaluable too.

AWS

Arrival of CyberFlood Virtual (CFV) in the cloud extends CyberFlood user realism from physical and virtual appliance to the AWS public cloud, along with AWS inherent capabilities. The extended capabilities of CFV - AWS public cloud solution can be summarized as follows:

  • Assure cloud-based services performance and security effectiveness

  • Assess design, deployment, and security policies of network devices in the cloud

  • Leverage a single solution for physical, virtual and cloud-based performance and security assessment of services

  • Measure and understand various cloud designs in terms of performance and security effectiveness

  • Validate cloud-based service offerings for customer proof of concept, competitive situations, benchmarking, and compliances

  • Create a library of tests developed once and used many times for cloud-based offerings

  • Use CyberFlood REST API to further automate service validations in the cloud

  • Get the best value with flexible licensing offered for CyberFlood physical, virtual and cloud-based solutions.

To find out how you can assure your cloud-based services, performance and security effectiveness with CyberFlood Virtual for AWS, please visit us at www.spirent.com/security.

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Reza Saadat
Reza Saadat

Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, Application and Security Group

Reza Saadat is a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at Spirent in the Applications and Security group, with over 25 years of experience in computers and data communication technologies. At Spirent, Reza works with the Product Management, Engineering and Sales teams to bring to market new, cutting-edge applications and security testing solutions for network equipment manufacturers, enterprises, and service providers. His in-depth industry, market and software development knowledge as well as collaborative design and development skills have resulted in the creation of numerous  hardware and software solutions, which have been successfully released at companies such as IBM Corp, Cisco Systems and many more.