IBM has been expanding its cloud infrastructure offerings for months, largely on its SoftLayer platform, offering platform-, infrastructure- and developer resources as a service. Now it’s adding security for doing things in the cloud
The company said Wednesday its Dynamic Cloud Security portfolio brings some existing and new capabilities for cloud together to protect data and applications.
“These are very relevant to cloud use cases,” Nataraj Nagaratnam, chief technology officer for IBM Security Systems, said in an interview, “If you have to manage access to your cloud applications you have to security over which users have access. So for customers using SoftLayer Cloud we have capabilities to manage access. There are also products for protecting data, and there are new services which can scan mobile or Web applications so you know they are secure before you deploy it. The third portfolio is a single pane of glass so from one monitoring and intelligence capability platform you can look at everything that is happening in your traditional and cloud environment.”
Most of the services are applied to enterprises using SoftLayer, but some can be used on Amazon Web services and SaaS services like Salesforce.com
Some of the new capabilities include
–Security Access Manager for SoftLayer, a virtual machine cloud access manger that controls login to SoftLayer by those granted privileged accounts;
–Single Sign on Service, an API offered through IBM’s Bluemix cloud service for developers, which can be used to authenticate those using an enterprise or cloud service. ‘We hide the complexity from developers,” Nagaratnam said;
-Cloud Identity Services, based on IBM’s recent acquisition of Lighthouse Security Group, a cloud security services provider, for managing customer and partner access to cloud services;
–to protect data in the cloud encryption isn’t the only solution, Nagaratnam said. A new cloud data activity monitoring, based on IBM’s InfoSphere Guardian product, is available for SoftLayer and Amazon Web Services;
–a cloud mobile application analysis service on Bluemix for Android and Web apps. Using AppScan Mobile Analyzer and AppScan Dynanic Analyzer developers can upload an app where it can be scanned for vulnerabilities;
–for better visibility IBM has extended its QRadar intelligence platform has been extened to the cloud so customers can see in one place what is going on in their data centres, private and public clouds — including Amazon and Salesforce. Until now QRadar was only an on-premise appliance.