Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms

Chapter 1. Cloud Security, the Collaborative Game

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.

Helen Keller

A call from MI5¹ was never a good thing. Monday morning was already a bleak mix of the usual English summer weather, which was caught between two minds as to whether overcast or rain was the order of the day. Happily ensconced in our beige office and sipping canteen coffee to keep awake, the call did the job that the coffee was sorely failing to do.

The point being made was crystal clear and cut through the Monday malaise like a cold shower:

“You have a breach. We are aware of it. Don’t fix it!”

We nodded along until the word “don’t,” when our surprise could probably have been felt all the way to Aberdeen.

“Don’t fix it?”

“That’s right. We are using the breach to track, trace, and gather intel on a much larger concern. Hold fire for now.”

“Ok, yes sir. We won’t fix it.”

That was new. Normally, you might simply rush to fix, or even find, a breach, but we were being ordered to not be that effective. That was fairly easy, as it turned out, and the officer from MI5 needn’t have worried. Fix it? We didn’t even know about it! This breach, noticed by the powers-that-be in Thames House,² wasn’t just news to our developers; it was news to the people running our systems and, yes, even to us, the security engineers. And it was our job to know about these things. We were the point people, the ones who had the cross-situation visibility and control—we were the brains of the ...