Aviatrix Blog 
Approximately 4 out of 5 global IT leaders agree that current cloud approaches are creating new security risks for their enterprise (CloudBolt). It’s a belief that skyPurple Cloud, a cloud services company, is working through with its customers every day.
Serving companies primarily in life sciences, healthcare, and biotech, skyPurple Cloud provides bespoke solutions that help its customers overcome challenges in their public cloud implementations. These companies are moving into the cloud, but often don’t have their own cloud expertise in house to help secure, optimize, and automate operations as they scale and grow.
“One of the main challenges that we find biotechs and life sciences companies have around using the cloud is security around their data and moving their data in and out of the cloud,” said Roy Long, Founder & Cloud Evangelist at skyPurple Cloud. “Obviously some of their data needs to be maintained onsite in their own data centers, and then they need to be sure that what they do move to cloud is secure and is transferred in a means that allows them to secure that data end-to-end.”
But finding the right solution to help with this challenge has been difficult, and skyPurple Cloud has historically had to partner with a couple of different companies to help them close the gaps. That is, until Aviatrix unveiled our Distributed Cloud Firewall last month.
The Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall addresses a key shift that’s occurred in the 15 years since LGFWs were introduced – the traditional secure network perimeter no longer exists in public cloud. Traditional firewalls, bolted-on to a cloud network, require traffic to be unnaturally redirected to centralized inspection and policy enforcement points. This approach dramatically increases operational complexity, creates bottlenecks, increases application latency, and drives up cloud data transfer costs. Cloud environments regularly have thousands of dynamic ingress and egress points on the “endless perimeter”, which quickly becomes operationally unfeasible with the traditional approach.
“Our current architecture for deploying security in the cloud is traditional – route to a central location, route to a central inspection VPC, and then inspect that traffic,” said Long. “With that solution, you’re not sure that you’re inspecting everything. What if you have NAT gateways and internet gateways and somebody installs something where you don’t know it’s actually been installed?”
Cloud security posture management helps with this, but enterprises still must then route that traffic to a central location or inspection point, limiting what they can do with their architecture.
“With the new distributed cloud, distributed security, distributed firewall model, what you’re doing is making sure that security is inline all the time,” said Long.
In addition to increasing security, customers are using Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall to significantly reduce costs. By replacing NAT Gateways with Aviatrix, one AWS customer saved $6 million a year. Replacing LGFWs, customers have saved additional cost, while increasing automation and agility and reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) and complexity.
According to skyPurple Cloud, they are glad to now have the solutions they need to help businesses on their journey into the cloud.
“Collaboration is key to helping us achieve our business objectives, and helping our customers achieve their business objectives as well,” said Long. “Aviatrix is a cloud native networking solution which allows us to look at the security needs of data and then provide security and tools which allow us to analyze and assess and close those gaps around security.”
To learn more about Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall, visit https://aviatrix.com/distributed-cloud-firewall/. You can also get in touch with skyPurple Cloud at https://www.skypurple.cloud.