(Chinese Version)

“The network is the computer,” said John Gage in 1984, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems. There’s no doubt that his opinion had been proved accurate in today’s Internet society. He successfully predicted the possible impact that the revolution of distributed computing technology would bring to the world. After years of competition of infrastructures, capital, and services, cloud computing technology is certainly making Gage’s vision a reality. In the past two years particularly, besides BAT’s aggressive expansion in this particular sector, newly-emerged cloud providers such as Qingcloud, UCloud and Qiniu had also successfully grabbed their fair share of the market.

Despite the seemingly prosperous market, the cloud service sector is in fact facing incredible challenges every day, from complaints on aftersales services and the speed of their products to attacks from hostile hackers especially. The cybersecurity issues that cloud providers are facing also bring up great concerns among the subscribers. Both enterprises and individual users are now questioning the safety of cloud computing consequently.

Last year, Apple’s iCloud was attacked by hackers and a number of nude photos of some female celebrities were leaked to the public, which raised intensive attention from the mass on iCloud’s cybersecurity issues.

Earlier this month, the Italian surveillance tech company Hacking Team was attacked as well. Being a company full of hackers didn't stop hostile hackers from attacking the company and stealing 400GB data from the company’s database. It was definitely the most ironic and embarrassing situation a ‘hacker company’ could be in. Needless to say, Hacking Team’s reputation had been ruined within the industry.

On July 24th, subsequently, AshleyMadison.com, a social networking website designed for married people to have affairs, was also breached by hackers. The website even faced threats from hackers afterwards, who demanded the operators to shut down the website once and for all or else they would release millions of users’ real names and profiles to the public.

The list goes on and on, and such things are also happening in China. For instance, we also witnessed cybersecurity incidents such as DNS Disaster, Mobile Trojan “XX Ultimate Weapon”, and the mass leak of the personal information of 12306 users.

According to statistics provided by Aliyun, the company’s CloudShield DDoS defense service stops over one thousand attacks every day. Apart from that, CloudShield’s firewalls also intersect web attacks over 10 million times on a daily basis. As for the “android knight” services of CloudShield, it faces over 500 million violent hostile attacks every single day. Given these terrifying numbers, it’s apparent that the Internet environment we are in is not safe at all and every minute and every second there are hacking activities going on. We don’t notice such things only because the attacks have been stopped by the cybersecurity services we use. To improve the situation, it’s certain that cloud service providers will have to take initiatives to fight back. This time, perhaps the hackers are in danger of being hacked.

Even though enterprises have set up so many perimeters and subscribed so many other protection services, why they just can’t see the intrusions?

Tons of security breach examples of high-profile organization show that hostile hacker activities have become a major cybersecurity issue for enterprises, but why such things continue to take place?

One of the most influential figure in the field of cybersecurity in China, Alibaba’s  cybersecurity research center’s Wu Hanqing believed that clouds would never be safe and they required continuous technical support to stay relatively safe. Moreover, it’s essential for cloud providers to possess mature rapid response mechanism.

On Alibaba’s Theives No More Conference on July 9th this year, Wu Hanqing once again mentioned Aliyun’s developing cybersecurity model: situation awareness. This very solution is expected to solve the question we have just mentioned above: Why enterprises still fail to detect hackers’ attacks even though they have deployed so many cybersecurity perimeters and subscribed so many other protection services?

Here’s the answer: cybersecurity defense is not visible. In other words, safety is only a picture in the eyes of the defense sides. If they can’t see beyond the pictures, then they can see nothing at all.

“A complete cybersecurity safeguard mechanism has vertical defenses,” Wu told TMTpost. “Tech companies such as BAT that develop solutions on their own can build a security framework in accordance with their own needs. From network perimeter to application framework, from host security agent to audit products, a complete stack of products is built. ”

As a matter of fact, in the product system of Aliyun’s CloudShield, there are services for DDoS defense, application firewall and the application safety knight on hosts, which can support each other and better maintain cybersecurity as a whole. Security software on hosts, especially, can fill the safety gap where network perimeter security models fail to adjust.

Zhang Fu, the founder of Qingteng Cloud Security, told TMTpost that domestic enterprises were lagging behind in terms of the cybersecurity level for the fact that they lacked enough tech professional talents and the awareness of cybersecurity.

“Chinese enterprises generally lack the awareness and ability to maintain cybersecurity. On the one hand, traditional cybersecurity services providers aren’t able to satisfy the demands of the Internet companies in China. On the other hand, it cost too much for companies to build their own safety net and it’s incredibly hard for them to find needed professional talents.”

The truth is, hackers will always find ways to breach your defense, even in ways you have never thought possible. Many small details can compromise the valuable assets of a company. It’s said that the Italian company Hacking Team was hacked via very basic techniques, which were “SQL injection” and “weak password” attacks. It’s hard to believe, right? But this is the fact and it shows the defense sides do have their internal problems to solve.

The traditional network perimeter technology is outdated, adaptive security models will be the future tendency

Overseas companies such as Amazon and even leading cybersecurity company Kaspersky, just like many cloud services providers in China, have been investing a large scale of money in enhancing cybersecurity in recent years. The recent breaches into these high-profile organizations have made cybersecurity companies question how they can keep up with a threat landscape that seems to be growing exponentially. On the 2015 RSA (literally the Academy Award in cybersecurity), they reached a consensus: the traditional perimeter network security models no longer fit the current situation and they can not meet enterprises’ demands for cybersecurity.

However, the cybersecurity industry had been working on network perimeter security models all along for 20 years. Wu also told TMTpost that the reason for perimeter security models’ popularity was that most cybersecurity services providers encountered difficulties that were hard to handle in deploying products, and therefore putting equipment to the network perimeter became the most convenient option to go for. It required lesser adjustment on the whole enviroment, didn’t need the clients to change their codes, and it didn’t require the clients to install software on the servers. It’s just convenient.

“But the reality is that keeping your cyber environment safe is so much more than that, and this approach would bring client operators extra risks.”

Zhang Fu actually had some very convincing reasons for why the traditional perimeter security models were not practical.

“Traditional perimeter security technology builds a defense perimeter, or let’s, a wall, to protect the data behind it. It doesn't require any knowledge of the client’s business, and therefore it’s not that effective as people expected. What Internet companies should do to improve security is change their security solutions according to their the different demands defined by different businesses. It’s a constant battle to fight.”

So here’s the question: can we build a cybersecurity defense system that can detect cyber attacks in time and make rapid response on the cloud? The adaptive security technology was specially designed to counter this problem and it could be the very answer.

In the 2014 Adaptive Security Architecture For Advanced Attacks Report, Garner pointed out that every enterprise must assume that they were always under cyber attacks to enhance the ability to detect potential threats and build a substantial security system. This report also tells the tremendous potential that adaptive security technology possesses.

International cybersecurity solutions provider FireEye spent one billion dollars in acquiring Mandiant last year, a cyber security company that dedicated to providing rapid response management solutions. It’s apparent that FireEye wanted to use Mandiant to improve its products in this field. What’s more, illumio, a startup company focuses on adaptive security solutions, has received 142.5 million dollars in three rounds of funding within just two years.

Alibaba’s CloudShield and Qingteng are also doing the same thing. It’s easy to tell that adaptive security models are becoming the mainstream among security services providers gradually. Based on adaptive security models, security provides are able to build up their constant surveillance and analyzing ability, which enables them to make quicker response to cyber attacks. Zhang Fu, founder of Qingteng, had his own opinion on adaptive security technology:

The adaptive security technology is the first solution that focuses on the things behind the firewall. That being said, it also takes the clients’ businesses into consideration and builds a security system from the inside, making cybersecurity defense a constant presence that processes and responses.

More importantly, security surveillance and execution directly work on every business unit and they do not rely on infrastructure or hardware, giving enterprises more details and capacity to monitor security status and analyze hostile activities. Apart from that, security operation and maintenance staff will be able to better control the abnormal operation of the internal system and hostile attacks from the outside, which allows this model to handle a variety of hacker attacks and make quicker response to advanced attacks, and in the meantime it can adapt to any infrastructure or business change.

In fact, there’s another crucial part that Zhang Fu didn’t mention, that is, adaptive security solutions can adapt to any platform (private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid clouds). According to Zhang Fu, Qingteng’s products were designed to transform the traditional security logic that focused on intersecting attacks to evolved solutions that could provide better and effective cybersecurity defense. It’s said that Qingteng’s solutions were greatly optimized in three aspects, which were average response time, mean repair time and attacker dwell time, in hopes of preventing security breaches brought by hacker attacks.

It’s better for enterprises to choose one cloud, hybrid clouds might soon become a history

Cloud providers continue to adjust their strategies and work even harder on technological research and development in the face of hackers’ constant attacks. But as for enterprises, what kind of cloud service do they need exactly? TMTpost has always been in close contact with many entrepreneurs outside the cloud-computing sector and they offered valuable opinions from their perspectives: they didn’t really know much about cloud services in terms of technological details so what they really need is quite simple actually, that is, clouds that are safe and don’t cost much. As a matter of fact, this simple demand makes combining disaster recovery backup with hybrid cloud services a popular solution for many companies.

The truth is, hybrid clouds are more customizable solutions since they combine the advantages of public clouds and private clouds. Adopting hybrid clouds not only saves lots of money but also drastically increases security level, and it’s gradually becoming the mainstream model for many companies.

However, Wu Hanqing holds a completely opposite view. He appealed to enterprises to choose only one type of cloud and predicted that hybrid clouds would become a history soon.

“Backing up data to two or even more clouds will add up the cost in multiple times, which means another great cost when transferring them.”

Wu Hanqing made a metaphor to further explain:

“This process is similar to the power plants during the second industrial revolution. In the earliest time people only wanted to buy themselves generators, but in the end they let the power plants do all the work for them,” Wu said. “What made this change was a matter of trust. Generally it’s going take some time for people to get accustomed to a new technology. But in the end people would always choose what’s best for them. That being said, everything depends on how mature the technology is.”

So when cloud computing technology has grown mature and stable enough, rational clients will always choose only one cloud.

Although the cloud service market in China still has lots of problems waiting to be solved, but one thing is for sure, that is this particular sector will soon boom in the country at a rocket speed. A report from IDC shows that by 2018 the cloud service market in China will reach a volume of US$2 billion while the market in the US will hit US$75 billion.

Safety, as a crucial part of cloud services, is the foundation during the transformation of the business models between cloud service providers and enterprises. It’s never just a matter of technological difficulties. It’s very difficult to make a company free from hacker attacks. To achieve it, the cybersecurity defense must be well enough while internal factors also should be taken into consideration.

Even though in the current Chinese cloud service market BAT dominate the entire sector, other providers that are more detailed and vertical are also emerging. The market needs third-party cybersecurity products to push it forward as well. Cloud service providers’ ultimate goal is, as a matter of fact, make enterprise services more affordable and less of a luxurious thing. They want Internet companies, regardless of their size, to be able to grow healthily in a relatively safe and fair Internet environment without having to spend much.

[The article is published and edited with authorization from the author @Song Changle, please note source and hyperlink when reproduce.]

Translated by Garrett Lee (Senior Translator at ECHO), working for TMTpost.