What is Workload and Cloud Workload Protection?

What is a workload? Among non-techy or more traditional sorts, ‘workload’ means the things we have on our plates, those things we must attend to or accomplish. But workload has a more modern meaning in the context of computing disciplines such as compute/analyze/store, cloud workload automation, cloud workload protection/cloud workload security, and an enigmatic thing called microsegmentation.

So what is this newer meaning of workload?

It comes down to computer processing. And it’s important for organizations of all sizes to understand this. Workload refers to a computer’s ability to handle and process work. When we talk about cloud workloads, we mean those environments will handle and process work, because we’re now abstracting away the computer, and it’s now just some fuzzy thing in the sky doing work for us – and we talk about that as a cloud workload.  

So a cloud workload is data being processed while crossing the often public internet and into shared, hybrid, on-premise or any other kind of cloud environment. How do you protect your private data in all of this exchange to prevent unintended cross-contamination, exposure, tampering, etc., and to comply with cybersecurity mandates as well as security and privacy laws?

Suddenly, the term workload means all your computing jobs that need to be processed, and the longer, more specific workload-derived terms get clearer. Terms like cloud workload protection and why it is important get clearer. 

How Atomicorp Brings Cloud Workload Protection

Organizations with security and risk management challenges can deploy software agents to take advantage of security automation and ease of use. These agents protect those hard-to-scratch parts of the network where you need extra attention and protection – for example, cloud workloads. Going beyond the classic attack-surface analysis, beyond focusing on direct external threats, you need defense against lateral movement attacks, the type of attack which seeks to spread across your computing infrastructure and plunder your databases, as with the recent SolarWinds Sunburst attacks of about 18,000 organizations.

Atomic Protector is a solution you can deploy on your cloud workloads, endpoints, servers and even devices where you can’t install agents. Just turn it on, and let it do the work for you. It protects the entire endpoint environment with built-in ‘defense in depth,’ including against the kind of advanced lateral attacks that have compromised even the most secure organizations.

Atomic Protector includes intrusion detection and prevention systems and everything in between. It secures across servers, laptops, VMs, and containers, whichever form your cloud venture requires.

Read the Endpoint Security, SASE, and Cloud Workload Protection Platform whitepaper.

Be able to:

1. Know your endpoint assets. How can you protect something if you don’t know it exists?
2. Inspect and monitor the state of all your assets with file integrity monitoring. A good FIM tool should monitor more than just the files and data stores containing sensitive data. It should also monitor configuration information and software native to the platform and alert on unauthorized and malicious changes.
3. Protect your endpoints and cloud workloads.
4. Secure access control with protected servers. 
5. View alerts of unusual network activity in an integrated SIEM console.
6. And more…

Get the cloud workload protection whitepaper.

Learn more about Atomic Protector.