protected application, thus mitigating the lateral movement these attacks depend on. Private cloud and hybrid cloud While useful for protecting physical machines, the software overlay nature of the SDP also allows it to be integrated into private clouds to leverage the flexibility and elasticity of such environments. In this role, SDPs can be used by enterprises to hide and secure their public cloud instances in isolation, or as a unified system that includes private and public cloud instances and/or cross-cloud clusters. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors can use an SDP to protect their services. In this implementation, the software service would be an Accepting SDP Host, and all users desiring connectivity to the service would be the Initiating Hosts. This allows a SaaS to leverage the global reach of the Internet without the enabling the Internet's global attack surface. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) vendors can offer SDP-as-a-Service as a protected on-ramp to their customers. This allows their customers to take advantage of the agility and cost savings of IaaS while mitigating a wide range of potential attacks. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) vendors can differentiate their offering by including the SDP architecture as part of their service. This gives end users an embedded security service that mitigates network-based attacks. A vast number of new devices are being connected to the Internet. Back-end applications that manage these devices and/or extract information from these devices can be mission-critical and can act as a custodian for private or sensitive data. SDPs can be used to hide these servers and the interactions with them over the Internet to provide improved security and up-time. See also Advanced Encryption Standard Global Information Grid IPsec Public-key infrastructure Transport Layer Security References External links Cloud Security Alliance “Introduction to the Software Defined Perimeter Working Group” Article from GCN - 1105 Public Sector Media Group "Black Cloud Darkens the Enterprise to all but Authorized Devices" Article from Light Reading - "Verizon and Vidder put SD-Perimeter around Enterprise Security" Article from CSO - "Goodbye NAC. Hello, software defined perimeter" IEEE "Software-Defined Perimeters: An Architectural View of SDP" Article from ComputerWeekly - "Gas distribution network SGN invests in software-defined perimeter" Computer security