NetApp Debuts Spot Security

NetApp debuted Spot Security, a new cybersecurity service aimed at advancing the company’s effort to grow its public cloud business to $1 billion in annual recurring revenue over the next few years.Publicly traded NetApp is best known as a provider of storage systems for enterprise data centers.

Spot Security is a cybersecurity service designed specifically to protect public cloud environments. It maps out all the components of a cloud environment and identifies resources with insecure configuration settings that could potentially be used by hackers to launch cyberattacks. Spot Security also detects anomalous user behavior that suggests a breach may have occurred.

Most valuable features is that it not only finds but also prioritizes potential cybersecurity issues. A common challenge for information technology teams is that their cybersecurity tools generate a large number of alerts about issues with a low chance of leading to a data breach, Spot Security’s ability to highlight the most severe vulnerabilities eases IT teams’ work. Eliminating spending time on false positives.

Spot Security determines which issues are most urgent by analyzing the topology of a company’s cloud environment. The service maps out how a vulnerable resource is connected with the other components in the environment to estimate the impact of a potential breach. Spot Security makes decisions by evaluating multiple types of operational data including information about network traffic and user activity, as well as data from cloud providers’ application programming interfaces.

The ability to find and fix cybersecurity issues quickly is especially important in the public cloud because organizations’ deployments change often, sometimes as frequently as several times a day. Every configuration change or application update has the potential to introduce cybersecurity vulnerabilities into an environment. Issues have to be detected and fixed quickly before hackers find them.

The applications running in a cloud environment aren’t the only IT assets that are updated frequently. In some cases, the underlying infrastructure resources are modified on a regular basis as well.

Spot instances cost less than standard virtual machines but come with a catch: Cloud providers can reclaim the excess capacity on a short notice if they need it. When that happens, a company’s spot instances stop, which is one of the factors behind why the configuration of enterprises’ cloud infrastructure resources can change fairly often.

The unit became part of the company through an acquisition last year. With the new cybersecurity service, Spot offers tools that make it easier for enterprises to use spot instances and help them run software container clusters.

The unit has emerged as a core component of NetApp’s strategy to put a bigger emphasis on the public cloud in its growth strategy. The company’s Public Cloud revenue segment, of which Spot is part, jumped grew 155% Y-O-Y last quarter to $79 million.