How to Drive Continuous Innovation with Rackspace Elastic Engineering for Security

New ideas, processes and services can only be implemented if you prioritize innovation. Unfortunately, ever-evolving security challenges and the ongoing shortage of cybersecurity talent present a very real challenge when leveraging cloud technology to implement new service models, improve customer engagement or increase operational efficiency.

To confidently innovate at pace, you still must secure your organization and address compliance needs. But the current staffing shortage is having an impact. According to a CyberEdge study, 93% of organizations believe they will benefit from additional staffing in key security functions.

Rackspace Elastic Engineering for Security helps you fill those staffing gaps with on-demand access to a team of security specialists, which we refer to as a “pod,” to help you move the needle on cloud security and compliance projects. To help you shape decisions through input from multiple disciplines, your pod would include an engagement manager, a lead architect, a security engineer, and a compliance expert, along with additional access to security architects, security analysts and penetration testers, when you need them. The pod works alongside your team in an agile, sprint-based model providing continuity and sharing knowledge.

Your pod can provide security guidance related to your cloud migration, applications or data in the cloud. After all, cloud security expertise is essential as you look to harness the capabilities of the modern cloud and transition to cloud native. It’s a cloud-first world with organizations looking to unlock the potential of cloud to reduce operating costs, build new revenue streams or for agile working practices.

Your Elastic Engineering for Security pod can help you enhance your defenses against cyberthreats by incorporating security automation into cloud native tooling like AWS GuardDuty and Azure Security Center, or resolve cloud misconfigurations before they impact your business. And of course, we also cover security event monitoring to help ensure your environment is kept safe.

Whether you have a security team of one, ten, or hundreds of staffers, — or none at all — we can help by delivering and end-to-end security solutions. Onboarding and configuration support, ongoing management and assistance with tuning, and compliance support are all covered by Rackspace Elastic Engineering for Security. The possibilities are endless when you have the right team of security and compliance experts working with you, so let’s talk about some of the larger benefits we’re already delivering for our customers.

Addressing compliance in AWS

We have a software-as-a-service (SaaS) customer that recently won a contract with a healthcare provider. Our customer didn’t have any internal security capabilities, but needed to meet HIPAA compliance and security standards in its AWS environment.

Now, with Rackspace Elastic Engineering for Security, the organization has a pod managing its security program. A lead architect, a security analyst and a compliance expert are providing security architecture and engineering expertise.

The pod analyzed the AWS security posture, provided vulnerability assessments, and then executed an action plan that involved reconfiguring, or “hardening,” the AWS infrastructure to prevent security breaches. The HIPAA requirements meant vulnerability management and AWS configuration are critical pieces of this security solution. The pod also implemented security automation improvements in the organization’s detection and response technology to help remediate threats.

With Rackspace Elastic Engineering for Security, this healthcare organization has end-to-end support for its changing security and compliance needs.

Supporting cloud-native security tools

Our second example is a financial services customer that needed help scaling its security team and applying automation to identify Azure cloud misconfigurations. Rackspace Elastic Engineering for Security and our Advanced Monitoring & Resolution for Security services now deliver Tier-1 support, automated fixes for common security events, and monitoring of Azure cloud-native security tools. In addition, our customer can escalate complex actions and remediations to its pod when needed.

Implementing security at the cloud edge

Rackspace Elastic Engineering for Security can also support your cloud edge application security solutions. For example, your pod could fine-tune your web application firewall (WAF) policies, which are notoriously tedious. Or you can delegate the management of your web application security tools including DDoS protection, bot protection and assistance with PCI compliance to your pod.

Let Rackspace Elastic Engineering for Security help your team implement a cutting-edge security program that focuses on continuous improvement and is backed by deep expertise to help defend against cyberattacks. Learn more about Rackspace Elastic Engineering for Security today.