Security Appliance for SDI Compliance Monitoring
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Solution Overview
Problem
Software defined infrastructure (SDI) environments present challenges in maintaining compliance with corporate security policies due to dynamic changes in virtual computing resources and assets, making traditional compliance methods insufficient.
Innovation Solution
A security appliance that evaluates SDIs by retrieving data stored in a tree structure, generating a NI model, and creating path documents to monitor and enforce compliance with corporate security policies.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional gatekeeper or periodic scanning methods are used to ensure compliance, then compliance checking is performed, but compliance cannot be maintained between scanning periods due to dynamic changes in SDI assets
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements continuous monitoring of SDI assets through automated agents that constantly track configuration changes, resource provisioning, and policy violations. This replaces periodic scanning with uninterrupted surveillance, ensuring compliance is maintained at all times without gaps between scans.
Solution Approach 2:
The system employs self-correcting mechanisms where automated agents detect compliance violations and automatically remediate them without human intervention. This includes auto-isolating non-compliant assets, triggering reconfiguration, or alerting appropriate personnel, enabling the system to maintain compliance autonomously between detection cycles.
2Measurement precision
If manual configuration monitoring is used in SDI environments, then security policy compliance can be checked, but users can still configure assets in violation of policy through ignorance or error
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements real-time feedback loops where monitoring agents continuously assess asset configurations against security policies and immediately notify users of violations. This feedback mechanism provides users with timely information about non-compliant configurations, allowing them to correct issues before they become security risks.
Solution Approach 2:
The system proactively prevents policy violations by implementing pre-configuration checks and automated policy enforcement rules before assets are deployed or modified. This includes validating configurations against security policies during provisioning and automatically blocking or correcting non-compliant settings before they can cause harm.
3Measurement precision
If frequent scanning of SDI assets is performed to maintain compliance, then compliance accuracy is improved, but system complexity and resource consumption increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides the compliance monitoring system into distributed agents deployed across individual SDI assets and a central coordination server. Each agent independently monitors its local asset, reducing the complexity burden on any single component while maintaining comprehensive coverage through the segmented architecture.
Solution Approach 2:
The system introduces automated compliance agents as intermediaries between SDI assets and security policy enforcement mechanisms. These agents handle the complexity of continuous monitoring, policy interpretation, and violation remediation, shielding the core SDI infrastructure from complex compliance management overhead while maintaining high monitoring accuracy.
Data Source
AI summary
A security appliance samples data about software defined infrastructures (SDIs) of a cloud computing environment to incrementally build models that map resource attributes indicated in fields to data types. The security appliance uses the model(s) to provide context sensitive help in policy rule constructions.