Cybersecurity extends beyond just public and on-premises cloud infrastructures.

However, even just narrowing it to those environments, it’s evident that chief information officers, chief information security offers, and cybersecurity practitioners have their hands full in today’s threat landscape.

“The CISOs that I speak with on the regular, there’s so much chaos out there about what they’re trying to deal with,” said Denise Hayman (pictured, right), chief revenue officer of Sonrai Security Inc. “They’re trying to take a look at all of the operational policies and pieces that they had put together in their on-prem world and trying to figure out how those same things apply in the cloud. And many of them are doing a really awesome job at getting their arms around it by hiring in the right people and looking at the way development has run to figure out what’s important to these people in their clouds.”

Hayman and Eric Kedrosky (pictured, left), chief information security officer of Sonrai Security, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Lisa Martin at the “Cybersecurity — Detect and Protect Against Threats” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how today’s CISOs are approaching cloud security threat management and attack mitigation. (* Disclosure below.)

Scale and speed in the cloud add complexity

Companies are moving at an unprecedented rate from conventional data centers and siloes to the cloud. Thus, they’re having to acclimatize themselves to the rapid speed and scalability that is typical in cloud infrastructures — and the concomitant security challenges therefrom, according to Kedrosky.

“One of the things I hear a lot of is that the scale and the speed at which the cloud operates and how to operationalize security within that context is a big challenge that they’re struggling with,” he explained. “And not to mention the new paradigms and how they’ve sort of shifted from the data center into the cloud world. And sometimes a lift-and-shift of your process or the way you did something before in the data center just doesn’t work in the cloud.”

Summarily, that sharp digression from the way they’ve grown to handle data — and the need to now put security and identity at the forefront of operations — is the primary cloud security concern that’s evident across industries today, according to Kedrosky.

To solve this, CISOs must identify where their most sensitive data resources reside, prioritize them, and wrap security and identity management resources around them.

“The other side of the coin is the identities,” Kedrosky said. “In the data center days, we built networks and those became our security boundaries. And we put our tools at those boundaries, watched what went in and out, and put our controls there. That doesn’t really exist in the cloud, so identities really have become those security boundaries. And so that’s when I say put identity and data security at the heart of your strategy, that’s what I’m talking about.”

What the enterprise is saying

Sonrai is a security-focused solutions provider whose offerings help companies reduce risk, ensure compliance and increase operational efficiencies, according to Hayman. Therefore, it follows logically that industry clamor informs their new product decisions and innovations on existing ones.

From a company perspective, it looks like customers are mostly dealing with data sprawl within and without their Amazon Web Services Inc. environments, Hayman explained.

“There’s just a staggering amount of data and processes that they need to figure out, with many of them in multicloud environments,” she stated. “Not everyone is just AWS anymore, and they have to protect workloads, services, people identities and non-people identities. Which is why we talk about it from the standpoint of how you can look at it from the outside in or you can look at it from the inside-out.”

The best practices that companies should follow in regards to securing their data and workloads begin with grasping where their data is in the cloud, then proceeding to classifying the data, understanding who the potential threat actors are, and undertaking continuous access monitoring , according to Kedrosky.

“When you flip that over and look at the identity perspective, you need to understand what the identities are in your cloud and not just your users — which is typical way of looking at it — but you really have to understand your users, but your non-people identities as well,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Cybersecurity — Detect and Protect Against Threats” event:

(* Disclosure: Sonrai Security Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Sonrai nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE