As enterprise IT environments continue to expand and become more complex due to the increased adoption of cloud computing, the task of ensuring their security grows more challenging. Public cloud platforms, being the bedrock of modern IT innovations, are integral for maintaining business agility and competitiveness. However, the advent of these benefits also introduces new security and compliance issues that necessitate comprehensive security controls for continuous prevention, detection, and response.

Managing Shared Responsibility with Optimal Security Architecture Cloud security is fundamentally about shared responsibility, where cloud service providers and their customers share the duties of security and compliance based on who controls certain assets. As a leading global cloud service provider, Alibaba Cloud is committed to securing its platform, while customers are entrusted with the security of their data and infrastructure within the platform.

As your security partner, Alibaba Cloud helps secure your systems with an architecture structured on these core principles:

1. Shift-left: This involves a suite of natively integrated tools with automated security and compliance checks, embedded into your cloud processes and infrastructure from the design phase.

2. Real-time inventory: This ensures an always updated, comprehensive inventory of all your cloud assets for complete visibility of your environment.

3. Quick, precise and continuous detection and response: This helps you address security and compliance issues promptly and effectively.

4. Built-in security: This allows for the native integration of your security and compliance tools with Alibaba Cloud.

Businesses can no longer depend on disjointed security stacks composed of various point solutions that don't interoperate, are unscalable, and lack connectivity. They're also challenging and expensive to deploy and manage. Depending on multiple agents with limited functionality that collect fragmented data fed to multiple consoles is no longer viable. This approach forces security professionals to manually correlate the data, hampering their ability to respond swiftly to threats.

Alibaba Cloud assists you in fulfilling your organization’s shared responsibility security obligations for your Alibaba Cloud IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) deployments. This is achieved by providing a versatile set of sensors for both prevention and response to threats, including lightweight, multi-platform Cloud Agents installed on assets such as Alibaba Cloud virtual machines.

Alibaba Cloud Sensors for Data Collection and Analytics Alibaba Cloud provides security teams with a broad range of sensors to collect security, IT, and compliance operational data from assets. These scalable, self-updating, and centrally managed sensors include:

1. Virtual scanner appliances that can conduct remote scans across your networks, hosts, and applications.

2. Internet scanners that perform perimeter scans on edge-facing instances, hosts, and URLs, offer a hacker’s view of your Alibaba Cloud environment.

3. A full API set for integration with third-party threat intelligence feeds and other tools.

4. Lightweight Cloud Agents installed on assets for real-time data collection.

The Cloud Agent Advantage Cloud Agents, working alongside the Alibaba Cloud Platform, allow customers to easily add security and compliance capabilities. The ability to deliver multiple functions via a single agent revolutionizes how security leaders are developing and creating security programs across hybrid enterprise IT environments.

The Cloud Agent is lightweight and consumes minimal computing and network resources. After completing a comprehensive initial data collection of the asset, Cloud Agent only gathers changes from subsequent scans. Benefits for securing Alibaba Cloud environments include:

1. No requirement for scanning windows. Cloud Agent continuously collects data on assets where it's installed, even when these assets are offline.

2. Continuous monitoring for faster vulnerability discovery and patch confirmation.

3. No need for complex credentials and firewall management. Cloud Agent only communicates outbound to the Alibaba platform.

4. Cloud Agent comes with 30+ flexible and granular performance configurations and scanning controls, allowing organizations to tune agent performance and bandwidth usage for specific environmental requirements.

Alibaba Cloud Secures Dev

SecOps in Clouds Alibaba Cloud supports three main use cases for securing DevOps in cloud deployments:

1. After integrating Alibaba Cloud into your DevOps pipeline, you’ll be able to gain a clear picture of the vulnerabilities and misconfigurations of your operating systems and web applications.

2. Teams can remediate these security problems before launching an app or image into production.

3. Teams can incorporate the lightweight and versatile Alibaba Cloud Agent into their DevOps environment to provide continuous monitoring throughout the CI/CD lifecycle.

Once instances have been released live, Alibaba Cloud helps you monitor and track their security posture via dynamic and interactive dashboards. You can search for and tag instances based on attributes and use pre-built or custom widgets to monitor deployments.

A Unified View of the Asset With Alibaba Cloud, you can conduct a comprehensive range of security and compliance checks on various resources within your Alibaba Cloud environment, including virtual machines, web applications, and containers. For Alibaba Cloud instances, several features such as Vulnerability Management Detection and Response (VMDR) with TruRisk risk prioritization, Policy Compliance, CyberSecurity Asset Management, and Custom Assessment and Remediation (CAR) are offered.

For Alibaba web apps, comprehensive discovery and performance of deep, exhaustive application scans at scale, malware detection, and more are provided.

In conclusion, Alibaba Cloud offers an all-encompassing cloud security platform solution that covers various cloud resources within Alibaba Cloud. This solution is accessible through a single interface, allowing for a clear view of resource associations, effective threat identification, and remediation prioritization with additional data and criteria.