Best Practices to Ensure Hybrid Cloud Security

Cloud usage is growing at an exponential rate. Recent estimates suggest that 94% of enterprises already use a cloud service. The growth of hybrid cloud is expected to reach $53.3 billion in 2021 from $28.1 billion in 2019. By 2022, more than 90% of enterprises will likely rely on a hybrid cloud environment to meet and exceed their infrastructure needs.

In recent surveys, 93.7% of organizations have said that cloud is critical to their immediate business needs for increasing growth rate, and another 88.4% believe it to be critical for their future business needs. Most convincing, however, is the estimate from Market Research Future that expects the Global Hybrid Cloud Market size to reach USD 173.33 billion with a CAGR of 22.25% from 2019–2025.

Hybrid cloud can be broadly defined as a cloud computing environment that orchestrates between the two different worlds of local private clouds and third-party public cloud services. This allows cloud deployment at companies to be more flexible as workloads can be conveniently moved between private and public clouds as per workload demands and allowing companies to take benefit of cost differentiation. Hybrid cloud security, as the name suggests, includes all aspects of data protection, applications and infrastructure security, both on-premises and in the public cloud. This broadly covers everything from business processes, workloads, and management across multiple IT environments. Companies that are not well informed about cloud security often erroneously assume that the cloud service provider must be responsible for ensuring cloud security. But while cloud providers do equip companies with the security tools and infrastructure required – it is up to companies to configure them correctly in order to best protect their data. So, the security of the application layer and sensitive data is always the responsibility of companies. If you’re looking for expertise in managing cloud security for your hybrid cloud environment, please refer Apex Cloud Services.

Ensuring the physical security of public cloud components is up to the provider. For private cloud, companies need to provide security with in-house infrastructure such as surveillance cameras, locks, limited physical access and a controlled access environment with watertight environmental control features.

Technical security involves a medley of security measures and protocols in order to secure highly sensitive and valuable data. Some of these include:

Encryption — Encryption processes ensure that data remains secure in transit and typically involves different encryption methods than data at rest. Encrypting data in transit also requires strong network session encryption while securing data at rest means full disk encryption and hardware encryption.

VPNs — Virtual private networks prevent third parties including governments from snooping into your network traffic and offer secure connections between components running in different environments.

Additional security measures — These can include role-based access control, change monitoring, ensuring redundancy in data backup, endpoint security and two-factor authentication.

Administrative security covers all relevant documented rules and procedures, including:

• Risk assessment
• Disaster recovery
• Data protection
• Employee training

Recent data suggests that 18.8% of enterprises believe interoperability between cloud types is the primary benefit of hybrid cloud computing. Companies can take advantage of a hybrid cloud plan by merging new platforms and technologies with existing solutions. This allows them to fully exploit the cloud’s flexibility and scalability even as they continue to use existing tech infrastructures. However, this is where the question of interoperability becomes persistent in the integration of hybrid cloud environments. This is necessary to ensure that the hybrid cloud setup works seamlessly and securely with existing solutions. This is why companies need the right technical expertise from the beginning to inform their hybrid cloud strategy in order to not only be aware of these challenges, but also balance out all the interoperability variables right from the architecture phase.

A hybrid cloud environment necessarily comes with complicated data security concerns. This is an especially sensitive issue as data security laws and regimes have grown increasingly stricter in recent times with companies coming under a variety of regulation frameworks, such as HIPAA, GDPR, CRPA and the CCPA. Compliance can be complex and requires companies to have experienced technical strategists in place from the beginning to come up with an effective hybrid cloud plan. The plan will need to take into account the business’s complex data processing needs and consequently design a highly secure and available connection between on-premise infrastructure and cloud infrastructure. For guidance on cloud migration strategies and cloud computing services, please reach out to IT Support Sacramento.

Following this principle only allows access to applications who actually need the access for the successful completion of specific tasks and job roles. This prevents users from abusing sensitive data, accidentally leaking it and data loss through compromised credentials. Permissions for role-based categories renders permission management simpler and enables direct line of sight to a significantly reduced number of power users. Strong Identity and access management (IAM) policies are a necessary requirement for secure access to information. Companies should always keep in mind that on-premise and cloud solutions implement IAM differently and using IAM effectively in a hybrid cloud environment will need technical expertise. For industry-leading technical expertise on Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, please contact Apex – Managed IT Services company.