Cloud adoption can throw up a plethora of challenges as organizations start shifting their applications and databases to the uncharted frontiers of cloud. It is like driving through the dense fog on a mountainous trail. In spite of being familiar with car’s control systems, such situations can make some of the best drivers feel insecure. It is the same feeling while moving data from on-premise locations to cloud.

Whenever you are handling data and applications that are stored at on-site locations, you have a superior visibility compared to cloud environments that are full of uncertainties due to lack of visibility of the cloud hosting infrastructure.

Faster Cloud Adoption

Complexity of the challenges that are concerned with cloud adoption is further intensified with the introduction of public and private cloud hosting models. It is an established fact that greater number of services and devices are connecting via cloud than ever and are exerting unsurpassed pressure on cloud architecture.

Introduction of new laws, region specific regulations, and local legislations are forcing organizations in insurance, healthcare, entertainment, and retail sectors to introduce exclusively designed services to different regions.

Organizations can accelerate streamlining of their services to the regional preferences by collecting and analyzing the information gathered by accessing big data. This can improve competitiveness of the organizations due to personalized offerings to clients.

However, it is not possible to gain such abilities without adoption of hybrid cloud that is a distributed and decentralized while operating as an extended arm of current systems and processes of the business. Such blends of clouds are also sometimes termed as fog computing because the total volume of data that is shifted to cloud is considerably less.

In spite of different models and adaptations of clouds for various business processes, the IT teams have to struggle to achieve better visibility and control in order to guarantee seamless protection and implementation of policies in the entire gamut of data and assets that are located on premise as well as in the cloud.

Understanding Security Challenges

Use of traditional IT security controls can impact the ability to implement controls in hybrid cloud models since the entire assortment of data and applications is beyond the reach of conventional controls. This is more pronounced in case of public cloud environments.

The situation gets more alarming with the growing menace of cyber attacks. Breach of an environment facilitates the attackers inflict extensive damages even to the extent of reaching on premise networks.

These kind of security gaps that can become magnified in frequency and the extent of damage to the entire infrastructure call for more well-defined controls with greater visibility and ability to exercise controls from the very location of data centers right up to the cloud to match elasticity and automation in cloud.

These security controls should also be able to ensure perimeter gateway protections by offering protection to the traffic that is moving between cloud and data center. Secondly the security solution must be able to protect the infrastructure from cyber threats that are found within the environments of cloud.

It should be ideally able to be deployed as a security VM inside the environment for inspecting and protecting assets and traffic within the cloud while also offering visibility of the entire cloud environment. Such protection can be implemented by way of micro-segmentation by grouping resources inside cloud environment and subsequently dividing them into smaller secured segments with logical boundaries.

The method is designed to improve ability of discovering and containing intrusions with inter-group and inter-segment communications and use of specific and dynamic security policies.

We can achieve ability to direct traffic within data center to virtual security gateways for in-depth inspection by using advanced threat prevention techniques including IPS, sandboxing, firewalling, anti-bot, or antivirus methods. This can block lateral movement of attackers from one application or segment to another.

Te solution needs to integrate smoothly with the orchestration and management tools of the cloud service provider. This can effectively enable implementation of the proper security policies in terms of applications by automation of security management processes. Such integration will also make sure that security processes do not hamper agility of cloud environment.

It is possible for enterprises to be empowered with greater flexibility and agility by use of hybrid clouds. These enable faster response to challenges of market and customer requirements. Integration of visibility, policy management, and advanced security methods can boost visibility and controls in IT as well as business processes.

Interesting Topics To Read:-

What Technology Is Needed For Hybrid Cloud?

Hybrid Server