Cloud rivals Microsoft, Google, and IBM have joined forces on a project dubbed the Cloud Security Notification Framework (CSNF) to help companies bolster their defense against hackers and other cybersecurity attacks.
CSNF provides a standardized way for enterprise cloud consumers to receive security events — such as alarms and logs — from all cloud providers. CSNF is implemented through a concept called a “decorator.” The decorator decorates security messages from AWS, GCP, Azure, IBM Cloud, and more and puts them into a common format. The decorator creates a common security information model, which has hugely positive implications for the industry.
CSNF Decorator was detailed during an online conference hosted by ONUG, the Open Networking User Group consortium of enterprise technology managers. The technology that emerges from the initiative is eventually to be released for free in an open-source model.
Companies teaming up for the CSNF include Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Raytheon, FedEx, Cigna, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, Kaiser Permanente, Concourse Labs, NETSCOUT, Cisco Systems, and ONUG.
“The main goal” of CSNF “is to reduce the toil and cognitive load that consumes so much time of SecOps professionals through automation,” says Nick Lippis, Co-Founder and Co-Chairman at ONUG. “The decorator democratizes security data. There is nothing that SecOps has to do; the decorator does it for them. They will be much more productive, have much higher visibility of security events across multiple CSPs, and the vendors who sell security tools can focus on better dashboard, insights and automated response algorithms.”
The CSNF Decorator can help ease ingestion of CSP security notification data into security infrastructure and provide CSPs translational services to understand security notifications between and across CSPs in a common way. Additionally, extended log information field attributes will improve understanding of context so that cloud users can prioritize assets they receive security notifications about.
