By Pete Nicoletti, Field CISO, Americas. Pete has 32 years of Security, Network, and MSSP experience and has been a hands-on CISO for the last 17 years and recently joined Check Point as Field CISO of the Americas. Pete’s cloud security deployments and designs have been rated by Garter as #1 and #2 in the world and he literally “wrote the book” and contributed to secure cloud reference designs as published in Intel Press: “Building the Infrastructure for Cloud Security: A Solutions View.” 

As with most CISOs I know, digesting the firehose of new updates to existing technology is a full-time job in itself. Finding good nuggets and learning from others and sharing with other security executives is a must.

So here is a good “nugget” for you:  I’m a frequent reader of posts in Hashed Out and I have consistently followed Casey Crane. Her previous posts on Hardware Security Modules and IoT risks were timely, well researched, and are always worth reading and sharing with your team. In her latest post: 19 Cloud Computing Statistics That Will Keep You Awake at Night she leverages her technical writing chops and provides key stats that are worth a closer look:

For example, “Cloud misconfigs lead to 15% of data breaches initial vector” and “65% of security incidents lead from user error,”  prompted me to reflect on my previous teams and vendors selections.  After 90 days here, I’ve come to see all the behind-the-scenes details that Check Point Software has in order to spot and prevent issues from those two significant risks. Now, I am kept awake for a different reason:

Casey cites research from one of our competitors. Their customers have reported breaches and issues…but our customers have not.  Since our founding of the firewall market more than 20 years ago, Check Point Software has focused heavily on prevention. I have also witnessed the passion and sense of urgency Check Point maintains in having the lowest number of software flaws and vulnerabilities and the fastest remediation time when they are spotted.  No other security vender comes close.  OK…I’ll admit it… I do sleep pretty well knowing this!

“Mail Server Based Server Compromises” is another area where Check Point has the leading solution with the fastest growth and that is highly recommended by customers: the Avanan solution. Old school email gateway protection is going away, being replaced by AI augmented, Check Point Threat Cloud powered, API-based solutions like Avanan.

Here’s what I’ve learned about Avanan that I think you would be interested in. First, it installs in under 5 minutes, has the highest efficiency rates and just about eliminates this risk.  If everyone adopted this email protection, I know I would sleep better at night!

Migrating workloads to the cloud offers companies benefits that are well understood: scalability, possible cost savings, redundancy, additional services, freeing up of staff for other efforts etc., but… you must understand the “shared responsibility model” and understand the consequences of ignoring or not assigning enough resources to your cloud project.

Addressing all of the 19 insomnia-causing risks is where Check Point excels. I advise you to contact your local Check Point representative today to consult with them on your project, identify all of the risks and give you a deep dive into the complete suite of our offering that addresses all the risks listed in Casey Crane’s great article. Towards the end of the article, Casey drop a cool “tl;dr” bomb (I’ll save you an urban dictionary look up: “too long – don’t read”).  Don’t become a statistic by not reading and understanding and addressing all these risks…and help me and you sleep better at night!   Get the article here.

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