Here’s an understatement: Data security is a major concern! Don’t fret. Listen to the freshly-launched Season 3 of the CloudBytes Podcast for an in-depth primer on all things cybersecurity.
It’s been been nearly three years, two seasons, and 45 episodes since we first launched The CloudBytes Podcast in 2020. Being a part of those (approximately) 1,350 minutes of fantastic conversation — not to mention the many more spent working off air — gave me such immense pleasure. Indeed, I consider them to be a highlight of my time spent at iland. That’s why I’m so excited to announce the official launch of Season 3, and another 23 episodes ready to be binged!
For those who may be unfamiliar with the first two seasons of CloudBytes (go check them out!), we focused very strongly on — you guessed it — the cloud. However, for me, there was one discussion topic that clearly stood out: Security is a top concern for organizations moving their data to the cloud. In fact, we devoted an entire episode to it last season. In the meantime, iland was acquired by 11:11 Systems (in case you hadn’t heard) — a company with cloud, connectivity, and security at its core. This major development opened up a whole new opportunity for me and the podcast: the ability to directly address cybersecurity.
As a legacy sysadmin, I decided to approach Season 3 as a cybersecurity primer for systems/cloud administrators like me. But I also wanted it to be something that could be interesting to people who specialize in cybersecurity. Anyone who is in this industry for more than a few years (generally) knows what “cybersecurity” is. But there are many, many disciplines that comprise such a simple phrase. So, with the intention of building a primer, I laid them out and tackled what we could.
The result is a brand new season of The CloudBytes Podcast with episodes that address the following topics:
- Network Defenses: Classic defenses like firewalls and network segmentation.
- Secure Connectivity: Distributed environments are almost a given, so how do we connect them together securely?
- Asset Management: You can’t protect or recover what you don’t know about, so tracking what you have is critical.
- Service Provider Management: If you rely on another organization to support your infrastructure (like a cloud provider), how do you ensure the security of your data with them?
- Supply Chain Protection: The Solarwinds attack made us all acutely aware of how much trust we put into our technology providers, but should we?
- Application Protection: Applications allow us to access data, so putting up defenses to protect them is important. Unfortunately, doing so is very dependent on the application.
- Data Protection: Data is what it’s all about, so how can we go about protecting the most elemental part of our infrastructure?
- Malware Defense: Ransomware is the cybersecurity threat at the forefront of all our minds. Understanding this threat must be the first step in stopping it.
- Vulnerability Management: Defending infrastructure is often times a battle to keep the holes in the dam filled, so how you track and address those vulnerabilities is critical to success.
- The Human Element: Cybersecurity is more than computer systems – there are people managing the infrastructure, defending the systems, and using the applications. They’re all critical to the protection of the data.
- Employee Awareness: It’s often said that people are the weakest link in the cybersecurity battle, so how do we best equip them knowing they’re still likely to fail?
- Identity and Access Management: Secure access to applications and data means properly identifying who is trying to gain access, what is being accessed, and what level of access they should have.
- Secure Configuration: The security posture of all systems, especially the cloud, is predicated on securely configuring the system – which can be daunting and should not to be taken lightly.
- Data Protection (Part II!): In the wake of ransomware and other destructive cyber incidents, the ultimate safety net is reverting to backups. So how should this be done?
- Data Recovery: Backups are great, but only if they can be recovered in the right place, at the right time.
- Log Management and Monitoring: Logs are haystacks that carry precious needles, but it’s no small task to find them.
- Detection and Response: The best way to find and stop cybercriminals is to detect their behavior from the very start and respond as quickly as possible.
- Penetration Testing: The best way to know where defenses are weakest is actively test them, but it’s not always as simple as finding a friendly neighborhood hacker.
- Private Cloud: Somewhere between public cloud and on-premises data centers is an approach to cloud that gives organizations a dedicated cloud environment, but is it also middle ground for security?
- Incident Response: Even the best defenses can fail, so every organization should have a plan on how to respond to a full-blown cyber incident.
As with past seasons, all the episodes have been released at once and are now available to binge over at cloudbytes.cloud. But if you’re a once-a-week podcast listener, you can subscribe to our Apple or Spotify feeds (or simply search in your podcast app of choice) to listen to the weekly episode drops. It was an ambitious amount of content to cover, but I was very fortunate to find a fantastic and varied set of panelists to discuss these topics. I hope you enjoy listening to these conversations as much as I did having them!
