Daydreamers tend to stare at the clouds and imagine entities from the shapes they see. Our minds form relationships from the bulges, wedges, and puffy forms to make animals, star ships, and people. From the clouds looking down, we see roads, farms, buildings, and all the physical entities we interact with everyday. For our information technology assets that are on the perimeter, these devices look like websites and applications that we interact with every day as well. We forget that these devices are used just like our public infrastructure for business to business services and electronic commerce transactions. Buzz words from the .com era form the backbone of our perimeter devices and are accessible from anywhere in the cloud. In looking outwards from your perimeter devices, we see the cloud. We see domains, address spaces, and traffic from friendly locations and unfortunately traffic from malicious entities. This inbound traffic is why we should stare at the clouds and visualize what they see about our devices.
BeyondSaaS is in the cloud. It is hosted in Microsoft Azure and gives that visibility from the cloud against your perimeter to see what your infrastructure looks like. Regardless of service, function, or purpose, BeyondSaaS can assess these devices for vulnerabilities, open ports, default passwords, web applications vulnerabilities, and many more. The solution will help you document and visualize the risks your perimeter devices face and what potentially are being targeted by malicious entities. Outside of being required by regulatory initiatives such as PCI DSS, looking downstream from the cloud is just a good security practice to prevent being compromised. It something we generally take for granted, but assessing everything touching the cloud is something every organization should do.
In order to begin, first document all of your perimeter IP addresses and web applications (if these are unknown, the solution can document all the locations web services exist for later assessments). Then build a Smart Group in BeyondSaaS. This will be a logical grouping of all the perimeter devices you want in a single scan.
Then, run an assessment; either a vulnerability scan, PCI DSS assessment, or a web application scan. You can manually enter addresses or use the Smart Group previously created.
When the scan completes, the user will receive an email with the report status and have the documentation necessary to visualize the results from the cloud against there perimeter devices. Below is a sample for a web application:
Staring at the clouds can make anyone wonder what's out there. Staring down from the clouds lets us see what we take for granted everyday. Just like viewing this blog on a web page. Having tools to look at your perimeter devices for flaws and visualizing them for risk, helps us understand the vulnerabilities as facts verses imagining and guessing if there really is a problem. Why daydream about what problems could be on your perimeter, when BeyondSaaS can provide you the facts? For more information, please click here. Prices start at $3,500 per year for unlimited vulnerability assessment.
