Q&A: Safety in clouds

Is cloud security the future of security?

Security-in-the-cloud will become one of the most important IT security technologies in the near future. But it doesn't necessarily mean older technologies will lose significance. We have several existing technology offerings that have been used for some time and are likely to be more widely deployed in our security solutions for years to come.

In many ways cloud security has already become a mainstream part of service offerings in the market.

You can find an example of this is our flagship consumer product, Kaspersky Internet Security 2009, which launched last year.

It features the Kaspersky Security Network (KSN) which is a cloud technology that collects threat reports from all the users of that product who have agreed to provide this feedback.

The result of this communal threat report sharing technology means we can protect our customers within 40 seconds of a new malicious program emerging on the internet. 

A few years ago such a reaction time was unimaginable and this shows how cloud security is already providing a dramatic positive impact to the level of protection that can be offered. 

Some of the other vendors are also going to launch their own cloud security solutions in the near future. This underlines the wider acceptance of distributed cloud technology solutions.

Is end-point security outdated?

We don't believe so. Kaspersky Lab's view is that endpoint security will remain extremely important because of the many threats that exist. 

For example, our consumer internet security product uses a range of other protection technologies, such as signature detections, heuristic detection, firewall, anti-spam, as well as another new technology called Application Control Module.

This tracks all activities performed by applications running on the machine. It controls the resource access of applications that aren't white-listed and also has a security rating system which helps assign the level of restrictions for each program.

We believe protection must embrace all levels and nodes of a network, including endpoints, of course.

Is Kaspersky Lab looking at increasing its cloud services?

Yes, we are constantly developing and improving our cloud technologies.

The potential of security-in-the-cloud is tremendous, and there are currently lot of ideas being discussed internally for how it can be used to improve protection for our customers.

In Kaspersky Internet Security 2010, due for release later this year, we will implement a more powerful version of KSN which provides even more effective protection against new unknown malicious software on the web.

This is vital considering there are tens of thousands of new malicious programs emerging every day.

As the cloud grows, the effectiveness of KSN grows with it - so every new customer that signs up to this service adds to the effectiveness of it, benefiting millions of Kaspersky users worldwide.

How will security in the cloud benefit the enterprise?

In general, the benefits are the same as for home users  - increased efficiency of protection and shorter reaction time to threats.

However, businesses take much higher risks when it comes to IT security than consumers do, for example: information loss, network downtime, network attacks from cybercriminals, and the constant risk of damaging a corporation's reputation due to malware infection and data leakage.

Add to that the size of some of today's enterprises, many with tens of thousands of workstations, and technologies like cloud computing can create exponential improvements.

Another benefit, if we count hosted security services as an example of cloud security, allows businesses to save a substantial amounts of money on hardware and IT personnel.

Hosted security computing means all content filtering and threat removal happens on the security vendor's servers, which means businesses don't need to buy additional servers, appliances or hire system administrators skilled in IT security.

As a result, in some cases cloud technology (in this case hosted security) brings huge savings and can be a bargain for small and medium businesses.

In a county like Australia where the number of SMBs is very large relative to the size of the population, we think services like hosted security will increase significantly over the next few years.

Will cloud security disrupt security process and create new vulnerabilities?

Not really. Since it is being designed by security experts from the very beginning, cloud security technologies provide the highest level of security.

Using our own cloud technology as an example - Kaspersky Security Network - it doesn't send out any sensitive data from clients' computers, not even the actual malware samples if they are detected. Instead it sends only the md5 hash files which can't be used to cause the users any harm, and at the same time allows us to identify and block new threats swiftly and effectively.