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Spot Security is generally available. The solution maps a cloud environment, recognizes misconfigurations and lists the most important vulnerabilities.

Public clouds are growing. According to a recent Forrester report, nine out of ten European companies use multiple public cloud environments. Vulnerabilities grow along.

Providers like AWS, Google and Microsoft invest vast amounts of money in the security of servers and software. Yet, security isn’t guaranteed. Most public cloud services have flexible settings. The configurations of an organization determine its security. Pressing the wrong button can literally cause a data leak.

It happened to Facebook in 2019. The misconfiguration of an AWS S3 bucket leaked the data of 540 million users. Two years prior, a similar issue put the personal info of 1.8 million Americans out on the street.

According to NetApp, Spot Security is the solution. The service’s preview appeared in October 2021. Meanwhile, Spot Security is generally available for AWS.

Spot Security

NetApp claims that Spot Security automatically recognizes the services and resources of an AWS environment. The solution then determines whether the services and resources are accessible from the outside. The technology estimates the severity of risks and presents prioritizes each risk accordingly.

Spot Security doesn’t solve problems. The service has an advisory role. The system indicates what should happen; developers and operators determine how it’s done.

An experienced security professional can find the same risks, and maybe even do a better job. However, manual investigations cost time and money. Spot Security isn’t necessarily smarter — it’s faster.

Spot by NetApp

Although Spot Security is available on its own, the service is part of a larger whole. The portfolio is called Spot by NetApp. Each product in the portfolio seeks to improve the services of major cloud providers.

The first product was ‘Spot’, a system that analyzes an application’s consumption to find the most cost-effective cloud licence. According to NetApp, organizations can reduce their cloud costs by up to 90 percent.

Spot wasn’t developed by NetApp, but acquired in 2020. Since then, NetApp regularly acquires organisations to expand the portfolio, including CloudCheckr and Instaclustr.