Risks and Benefits of Hybrid Cloud Architecture
According to Gartner, approximately 85% of organizations will be embracing a cloud-first principle by 2025. Transitioning workloads to the cloud has offered businesses the flexibility
Cloud computing allows access to computer system resources, from any location, via the internet. Companies no longer need to invest in costly on-premises servers that need to be maintained, but can instead outsource this maintenance to a cloud service provider. While cloud computing provides many benefits, securing a cloud environment can be challenging due to the expanded attack surface.
For organizations just beginning to explore the cloud, selecting the cloud infrastructure that is right for your business can be overwhelming. There are pros and cons to each model. Which you choose will depend on your business’s resources, as well as the level of control you would like to have over your data.
Cloud service providers (CSP), such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google, allow companies to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing without the strain of managing the required infrastructure. The level of responsibility that you as the consumer of these services retain versus the responsibility taken on by the CSP is determined by the cloud security service model.
Cloud costs can quickly get out of hand, so it is important to go into this transition with clear goals in mind. Conduct an audit of your digital assests to determine which workloads should be moved to the cloud and which would be better suited to stay on premises. Some workloads may be able to simply be rehosted in the cloud, while others must be replatformed or rearchitected to make better use of cloud resources.
A hybrid cloud allows organizations to maintain on premises servers or private clouds for sensitive data or legacy workloads, while taking advantage of cost-efficient public clouds for rapid application development and data storage. They facilitate remote work and wider accessibility of your services to customers around the world. Hybrid clouds may also be used for backing up data as part of your ransomware resilience strategy.
However, with some of your data residing in the cloud and some residing inside your private network, it can be difficult operationalize data streams coming from different data feeds and vendors, in different formats. To effectively secure a hybrid cloud, you need to invest in the staff and tools needed to manage it.
With the rise of remote work and adoption of cloud-based work environments, identity can no longer be assumed based on location or device but must be verified by other authentication factors. IAM in the cloud relies on policies such as least privilege and zero trust to routinely verify that users have access to only what is needed.
A zero-trust approach to security, as the name implies, means that no user or application is inherently trusted. All access must be verified before permission is granted. A zero-trust approach relies on the principle of least privilege and microsegmentation of resources to limit access to just what is needed for the work being done. Behavior is monitored during the session as well, and access may be revoked if suspicious behavior is identified. Zero trust becomes particularly important in the cloud where there is no physical perimeter to define in-network traffic as inherently safe.
Vulnerability scans, in conjunction with penetration testing, can help identify vulnerabilities. It’s important to keep in mind vulnerabilities that are specific to the cloud environment such as scanning containers and identifying misconfigurations.
Hybrid clouds introduce a unique set of data protection challenges. Because data is moving on the open internet, encryption is more important than ever, both for preventing a data leak, and ensuring you’re in compliance with laws like GDPR. Another requirement of these laws is being able to delete data upon request, which can be difficult without proper visibility across the entirety of your hybrid cloud environment.
One of the biggest sources of cloud vulnerability is misconfigurations. Cloud Security Posture Management tools are designed to help automatically detect and remediate misconfigurations and check compliance with applicable regulations.
A cloud security framework provides guidelines for security in the cloud. These frameworks offer a roadmap for organizations shifting from a traditional on-premises approach, to a cloud-focused approach, by providing policies, tools, configurations, and rules needed for secure cloud use. policies, tools, configurations and rules needed for secure cloud use.
According to Gartner, approximately 85% of organizations will be embracing a cloud-first principle by 2025. Transitioning workloads to the cloud has offered businesses the flexibility
According to RH-ISAC’s 2021 CISO Benchmark Report, nearly 80% of CISOs anticipated a hybrid work environment in 2022. With the need for reliable access to
Identity and access management (IAM) is a strategy for protecting critical information within your organization by limiting who is able to access privileged resources. With
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