Your Checklist For Securing Hybrid Cloud Environments

Companies used to worry primarily about hackers breaching the network perimeter. Today, east-west traffic, i.e., traffic between systems inside the network.

According to the Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report, 89 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy in place. If your customers have adopted this model, they are also faced with additional complexity.

With the need to support applications located across multiple deployment points including data centers, hybrid clouds and multi-clouds, the threat environment continues to expand.

Companies used to worry primarily about hackers breaching the network perimeter. Today, east-west traffic, i.e., traffic between systems inside the network, dominates the corporate data flow—keeping your customers’ IT and security teams awake at night.

When implementing any cloud security solution, it’s best to assume that a breach is bound to happen and ensure that your customers’ cloud solutions remain resilient and protected.

Key Elements for Securing Hybrid Clouds

Hybrid clouds typically have resources spanning assets that you or your customers’ IT teams control as well as public cloud infrastructure, specific Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), or data resources that require complete visibility. End-to-end management, segmentation and securing external connections are the most critical elements of a hybrid security solution.

• Management via a single pane of glass. With data, applications and workloads spread across multiple locations, security teams need to have single-pane management of the entire network including central analytics for threat intelligence. Point solutions with separate management interfaces result in unnecessary complexity and additional exposure to cyber threats. Provide your customers with security solutions that integrate a single view across all systems and can track data flows across the entire network—providing IT and security teams with relevant, actionable information.
• Segmentation. A challenge with hybrid cloud is that it combines critical internal resources with external connections and data resources. These mixed environments include both permanent external connections and temporary data movement. Business units and critical applications not directly associated with the hybrid environment must be segmented to minimize the impact if there is a breach.
• Secure Connectivity. A hybrid cloud solution must accommodate virtual private network (VPN) functionality, including the ability to provide secure temporary access to resources needed while protecting the rest of the network. Migrating data between locations, loading large amounts of data from external resources, and utilizing cloud-based third-party analytics all require discreet connections to external resources which can pose risks. Your cloud security solution must provide the right protection based on the risk profile of these unique network connections.

Matching Hybrid Cloud Security to the Cloud Paradigm

In addition to addressing the unique deployments of a hybrid cloud, your cloud security solution must also operate along the same lines as a cloud environment. It must be scalable, consistent, segmented and adaptive. Here are some questions to ask when evaluating cloud security solutions:

* Scalability. Can the solution scale to match the elasticity and dynamic growth of a cloud environment?

* Consistent. Can you maintain consistency in policy enforcement, visibility and protection across the cloud?

* Segmented. Are critical systems, workloads and applications based on unique risk profiles segmented?

* Adaptive. Can the security solution follow applications and data to any cloud? Is there flexibility to shift cloud strategies and readily secure those changes without taking on additional complexity or sacrificing security?