New Capabilities Enhance Acquia Cloud Security
The need to ensure that customers’ information is secure is at its highest. While brands, today, expand their reach in this digital world, cybersecurity is always a top concern. Recently, Acquia announced new security and compliance competencies for the Acquia Cloud with the aim to help reduce operational resources while increasing data protection and 
simplifying the user experience. The tools that they introduced in the update will enable users to boost security innovation and maintain digital compliance.
The new Acquia Cloud security and compliance capabilities allow for an enterprise’s high-level type of data protection without burdening the security and operations teams.
“These new capabilities for Acquia Cloud empower our customers with insightful governance by providing foundational security principles directly to our customers,” said Joe Janik, Chief Information Security Officer at Acquia. “Built on AWS’ platform, these innovations provide deeper insights into hosted applications along with a comprehensive set of security capabilities.”
I was able to connect with Acquia’s Joe Janik, Chief Information Security Officer, to discuss the new security and compliance competencies for the Acquia cloud, how it affects customers, and hear his thoughts on how security will evolve.
Could you tell us more about the new tools and enhancements that you have included for Acquia Cloud?
“We’ve recently added new enhancement capabilities for Acquia Cloud—including a broader set of compliance and security services that are available for enterprise Drupal deployments. These new Acquia Cloud enhancements include an upgraded SSO service that seamlessly unifies management of internal and external user authentication, protecting sensitive information and offering improved governance across IT managed systems and Log Forwarding and Security Information and Event Management Systems (SIEM) integration, which allows users to configure Acquia Cloud to share logs securely with their SIEM, thereby providing more visibility to improve incident detection and response. Additionally, we’ve improved access and governance with Acquia Cloud Shield, a private, isolated cloud for sites that require heightened levels of secure access. Lastly, Acquia Cloud now offers support for the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2, a U.S. government standard that defines cryptographic module security requirements and is critical for federal customers.“
It was mentioned in the press release that: “These new capabilities for Acquia Cloud empower our customers with insightful governance by providing foundational security principles directly to our customers.” Could you explain how your customer will be empowered?
“Acquia Cloud provides a powerful cloud-native web hosting platform to build and manage Drupal-based digital experiences, freeing customers to innovate on every channel, engage with their customers and grow their brands. Acquia’s new security capabilities ensure that our customers are up-to-date on the latest security requirements through better integration into hybrid cloud environments and increased flexibility in both configuration and control. Ultimately, by providing our customers with these features, we are giving them the comfort of knowing their information is safe which allows them to focus on delivering more features and functionality to their end users.”
Today brands are expanding their digital offering and security has become a significant factor. How has security innovation and compliance affected how digital platforms function today, and how do you see it being played out in the future?
“When expanding your digital experiences, security must be a foundational element in building and maintaining the trust of any brand. Acquia Cloud enables that foundational trust element by providing a market leading secure and compliant Drupal hosting environment. The security landscape is always evolving with threat actors advancing and developing new tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) for conducting their attacks. With the newly released security capabilities, Acquia remains committed to security innovation and being a trusted partner for our customers. In furtherance, we’re also internally leveraging the great work of MITRE and the development of the ATT&CK Matrix, a comprehensive knowledge base of adversary TTPs, to continually assess our security posture and mature our protection profile for Acquia Cloud.”
Acquia Cloud enhancements include the following:
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SSO: An upgraded SSO service seamlessly unifies management of internal and external user authentication, protecting sensitive information and offering improved governance across IT managed systems.
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Log Forwarding and SIEM Integration: Customers can easily configure Acquia Cloud to share logs securely with their Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems, thereby providing more visibility to improve incident detection and response. Acquia Cloud supports forwarding logs to popular SIEMs including Splunk and Sumo Logic.
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Access and Governance: Acquia Cloud Shield, a private, isolated cloud for sites that require heightened levels of secure access, now offers optional VPC peering so companies may connect their AWS-hosted VPCs. Additionally, customers may use a self-service UI to manage access for greater administrative flexibility.
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FIPS 140-2: Acquia offers support for the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2, a U.S. government standard that defines cryptographic module security requirements and is critical for federal customers.
Ending Notes
Built on AWS infrastructure, Acquia Cloud is a PaaS offering from their Acquia Experience Suite Platform. Enabling enterprise users to develop and manage Drupal-based websites and experiences. While Acquia Cloud is generally compared to other cloud-based CMS systems such as Sitecore, Adobe, and Microsoft Azure, what sets them apart in this large playing field is its flexible integrations and high-level developer support. These new capabilities, along with their cloud platform stack, will help reduce costs, simplify site management, increase innovation, and allow clients to develop their brands.
Acquia is the open source digital experience company, providing technology that enables their customer to embrace innovation and create moments that matter. If you would like more information about Acquia and their offering, please feel free to reach out to one of our senior analyst’s here at CMSCMedia.
Natalie Evans
Natalie Evans has over 16-years in the tech industry and currently works as the event coordinator and tech reporter for CMS-Connected, keeping up-to-date on what's happening in and around the Content Management industry.