Bolstering cybersecurity in Malaysia: Deep observability for cloud environments

In recent times, cybersecurity in Malaysia has experienced a surge in data breaches affecting various sectors, including government and financial services. The rapid increase in the country’s internet user base is fueling an accelerated digital transformation.

In fact, the number of internet users in Malaysia has been consistently growing, reaching almost 29.5 million users in 2022. This expansion, along with the increased dependence on the internet for work and personal communication due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has resulted in a higher volume of cyberthreats targeting the workforce.

The state of cybersecurity in Malaysia

According to Surfshark’s 2022 Q2 report, Malaysia ranked eleventh among countries with the most data breaches in the cybersecurity category during the second quarter of 2022. The research also showed that between April and June 2022, the data of 665,200 Malaysians was compromised.

These threats pose a significant challenge for organizations that have adopted a hybrid work model. As companies have accommodated the massive shift to a mix of in-office and remote work, they have encountered complexities in their hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Tech Wire Asia had the chance to speak with Michael Dickman, Chief Product Officer at Gigamon, who provided insights on how deep observability represents a new frontier in enhancing security and observability tools through actionable network-level intelligence.

According to Dickman, the evolving cyberthreats have led organizations to adapt their threat mitigation strategies by increasing their network visibility and harnessing the power of observability.

“Taking it a step further – organizations that enhance traditional capabilities and leverage metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) with deep observability, provide their IT leaders with valuable, real-time network-derived intelligence. This intelligence allows organizations to access the depth of insight needed to troubleshoot the toughest problems and root out the most sophisticated threats,” he commented.

The rise of cloud and edge computing

The market is already seeing increased investments in cloud services, with 51% of global IT leaders considering it a priority over the next few years. Similarly, spending on edge technology will continue to rise. With varied investments, it seems extremely likely that there will be a diverse assortment of technology used across IT teams. This often results in tool fragmentation that makes it harder to mitigate organization-wide risk. As a result, the cost and complexity that comes in managing digital environments often escalates, which can limit an organization’s ability to advance within their industries.

“To stay ahead of emerging threats and better manage these costs and complexities, organizations must adopt a more collaborative IT approach and break down technology silos,” said Dickman. “A holistic view across multi and hybrid-cloud applications is necessary to maintain a strong security posture.”

Additionally, NetOps, SecOps and CloudOps teams must work more closely to find a common workflow with IT tools, and train their teams to use the enriched data observability solutions offered. Only then will organizations be able to holistically manage their cybersecurity, and fully realize the transformational promise of a resilient and responsive digital infrastructure.

Dickman emphasized that organizations in various sectors, whether private or public, need to collaborate closely with third-party providers to integrate the most recent cybersecurity recommendations from federal authorities. To stay a step ahead of cyber adversaries, a united effort is required, where all parties involved collaborate to harness collective intelligence and enhance defenses accordingly.

Addressing future challenges in observability for enhanced cybersecurity in Malaysia and beyond

Dickman noted that as the threat landscape persistently evolves, organizations will consistently confront new challenges. To combat this, deep observability enables IT leaders to spot rogue activities quickly and effectively. Identification in a timely manner is critical to take proactive measures, assess threat actors that could be lurking in the network, and determine next steps. In fact, 75% of IT leaders cite observability as critical to forming a strong security posture and mitigating threats.

“Specifically, teams are facing an increasing number of security challenges with Kubernetes as it becomes a more common way to deploy applications in cloud environments,” said Dickman. “Organizations need visibility into Kubernetes containers to be able to track sessions and detect when a vulnerability is exploited by an adversary.”

Deep observability can support defense in-depth with a higher level of visibility into how and when Kubernetes are accessed.

Gigamon’s unique deep observability solutions

Pandemic-driven digital transformation has led to 82% of large organizations using hybrid cloud environments, increasing complexities and security risks. Gigamon’s Deep Observability Pipeline (DOP) enhances cloud, security, and observability tools with real-time network intelligence, enabling defense-in-depth and performance management across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.

DOP offers elastic visibility and analytics for data-in-motion across any cloud network, covering internal and external traffic. Its visibility-as-code feature integrates with cloud automation for on-demand scaling, ensuring enhanced security, compliance, and performance to support digital transformation initiatives.

“Furthermore, the DOP goes beyond current observability approaches that rely exclusively on the logging of MELT by providing organizations with deep observability capabilities for any network tool. This added value allows the DOP to deliver the “ground truth” of data-in-motion to cloud tools, including observability into east-west traffic containers and unmanaged devices through network application metadata,” explained Dickman.

The Gigamon team’s DOP has also been integrated with AWS and other leading cloud platforms and tools, which provides a unified view across hybrid infrastructure that is easy for customers to leverage within their existing tool stack.

Gigamon has partnered with an expanding ecosystem of partners, including Dynatrace, Sumo Logic, New Relic, and AWS, to integrate network-derived intelligence for clients like Lockheed Martin, Johns Hopkins, Under Armour, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Together, they enhance customers’ cloud, security, and observability tools with real-time network intelligence from packets, flows, and metadata, enabling defense-in-depth across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.

---

---

---