"Securing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Protecting Cloud-Based Systems from the Ground Up"
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My role
Design Competition, Rapid Research, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Rapid Prototyping
Timeline & Status
9 Months
Overview
SkyShield provides comprehensive security for all infrastructure as a service, including AWS, GCP and Azure. It uses a contagion model to prioritise alerts and a graph on the back end to ensure everything is connected.
SkyShield provides asset linking, auto-mitigations, malware scanning, and enforcement of best practices. It exports to Sims, integrates with teams, email, and ServiceNow, and has discoverability checks to identify potential vulnerabilities.
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SkyShield was created to tackle the rising challenges of managing and securing multiple cloud services. With cloud adoption booming, organisations needed a solution for full visibility and control. This product aligned with the company’s vision to address the evolving demands of cloud security.
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Getting familiar with AWS Architecture Icons and AWS Architecture Center for diagramming was time-consuming.
Current tools lack the ability to prioritise alerts and offer a comprehensive view of the infrastructure.
What if SkyShield simplified the process of securing all cloud infrastructure with real-time monitoring and automated mitigation?
What if this allowed organisations to ensure compliance with best practices while reducing the time spent on manual security management?
It was critical to first understand where the real-time cloud monitoring and threat detection fit within the broader cloud security and infrastructure management lifecycle.
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A research workshop informed us that for Darktrace Cloud's vision to succeed, we had to expand our focus beyond traditional security teams to include cloud infrastructure experts and DevOps professionals.Naturally, this meant ensuring the platform could support the diverse needs of tactical users managing complex, multi-cloud environments (Figure 3.1)
Overlooking legibility & formatting.
Lack of visual treatment to support longer entries and text wrapping.
To make sense of an otherwise unconventional set of steps for creating a release, I started by exploring ways to foster a perceived sense of progress.
Shown in Figure 3.1, categorising releases into two stages helped mitigate the cognitive load of seeing all the steps at once.
Additionally, overly-technical terms were revised to better cater to a general audience.
Having structure also helped surface some heuristic issues; whichmainly involved confusing navigation and lack of edge case considerations.
I conducted three in-depth interviews, these interviews allowed me to explore participants' past experiences with music distribution platforms and their expectations for Beatclap services.
The findings confirmed my assumption that users prefer managing their music revenue and distribution on a computer, as they believe it minimises errors and streamlines the process.
One participant expressed their frustration:
"I find it incredibly inconvenient to track my music revenue across different platforms every single time. It's frustrating and time-consuming."
After two weeks period I created the flow diagram to illustrate the whole process, with the aim to scope the application with its problematic parts as well as possible conflicts.
Based on research, flow diagrams and information architecture I began working on the interface designs. High-fidelity wireframes were used as foundation for demoing and usability testing.
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One of the most significant impacts of working on this project was introducing a new design language throughout the company.
I conducted three in-depth interviews, these interviews allowed me to explore participants' past experiences with music distribution platforms and their expectations for Beatclap services.
The findings confirmed my assumption that users prefer managing their music revenue and distribution on a computer, as they believe it minimises errors and streamlines the process.
One participant expressed their frustration:
"I find it incredibly inconvenient to track my music revenue across different platforms every single time. It's frustrating and time-consuming."
Darktrace / CLOUD is an intelligent cloud security solution that uses Self Learning AI to deliver complete cyber resilience for multi-cloud environments.
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A standard set of layout grids and breakpoints (Figure 4.0), was critical in ensuring we could design and build quickly and consistently.
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By treating the dashboard and account setup as customisable hubs (Figure 6.0), it enables security teams to collaborate more efficiently and gain quicker insights into their cloud environment.
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By allowing users to visualise the event log and inspect multiple alerts simultaneously (Figure 6.1), Darktrace Cloud streamlines the investigation process, enabling security teams to quickly identify and address potential threats.
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By integrating Microsoft Teams with the event log dashboard (Figure 6.), Darktrace Cloud facilitates real-time communication among team members while allowing users to quickly access and filter alerts through Advanced Search, ensuring swift collaboration and incident resolution.
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By offering an intuitive, visual representation of AWS architectures (Figure 6.4), Darktrace Cloud enables users to interact with and monitor resource relationships in real-time, quickly identifying high-risk areas and associated alerts for a more informed decision-making process.
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A Skyshield design prototype was presented at an all-hands in mid-February 2023 and was well-recieved. The team really wanted to start building it.
It helped uncover opportunities to explore and led to quick and informed design decisions.
Not having a concrete direction pushed me to be creative and explore big ideas that led to fun and unexpected solutions.
Being in the same physical space and seeing collective ideas visually unfold led to some of the most highly fruitful conversations I've ever had.
If an added extra step led to a more intuitive and error-free experience, it was worth the additional manual effort.
