Four Reasons to Use Hardened VMs for Your Cloud Migration
Ensuring your organization’s IT environment is not only secure, but also patched regularly, can be challenging. Migrating to the cloud can help address these challenges in unique ways. For example, CIS Hardened Images, virtual machine (VM) images built to defend against cyber threats, can help. CIS builds these securely pre-configured VMs to the secure configuration guidelines of the CIS Benchmarks. Read on for four reasons why cloud migration cloud be right for your organization.
1. Misconfigured Operating Systems
A primary concern for your organization when migrating to the cloud is securing your servers. By leveraging VMs in the public cloud, system admins and CISOs can deploy a single image across multiple workstations. Starting with a base operating system is one way, but base images lack independently developed security. That’s why CIS Hardened Images are important for organizations migrating to the cloud. CIS Hardened Images are:
- Built to CIS Benchmark recommendations
- The only consensus-based best practice security configuration guides both developed and accepted by government, business, industry, and academia
- Recognized by the DoD Cloud Computing SRG, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and NIST as a secure configuration standard – which also applies to CIS Hardened Images
- Patched regularly by CIS solutions architects
Once organizations migrate to the cloud, they can access CIS Hardened Images from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud Marketplaces.
2. Upfront Hardware Investments
Avoid hardware purchasing, licensing, and maintenance by migrating to the cloud. For pennies per compute hour, your organization can be up and running without having to buy and install physical machines. This can be a major time savings in addition to saving on expensive technical equipment. Then, you have to take the time to harden each workstation. With CIS Hardened Images, each VM launches secure from the start, allowing organizations to relieve worry about securing their servers immediately after cloud migration.
3. Inflexible Infrastructure
Cloud computing is renowned for its flexibility and scale-up, scale-down as-needed nature. Whether you’re looking to increase the memory of a single computer system or compute power of a larger network of machines, CIS Hardened Images make it easy to secure your entire cloud infrastructure. That’s why organizations with fluctuating workloads migrate to the cloud. They can work in an environment that can handle increased growth with ease.
4. Increased Security after Your Cloud Migration
Each CIS Hardened Image includes a report from the CIS Configuration Assessment Tool, CIS-CAT Pro, showing conformance to the applicable CIS Benchmark. This report ensures your organization knows exactly which configurations are in place on your VMs. So, you and your team can work with confidence knowing that your machines are securely configured and safe from a variety of cyber threats. This is particularly important in the cloud migration process. Organizations, especially those in regulated environments need to easily audit their environments. These reports make that possible.Prior to migrating to the cloud, it is important to understand the impact it will have on your organization. Similarly, a crucial first step is to build strong security protocols and procedures. For virtual machine images in the public cloud, CIS Hardened Images provide independent, globally trusted security. Because these VMs are regularly patched and provide evidence of CIS Benchmark compliance, it’s an easy decision to utilize CIS Hardened Images to keep your cloud workloads secure.
