There is no doubt that cloud computing technology is now reaching all sizes of businesses and markets, offering a great opportunity for companies to achieve flexibility, efficiency, and scalability.
However, large enterprises are still concerned about how cloud technology can enhance or replace their entire IT environment. This is probably why a lot of companies are considering to implement a hybrid cloud environment that comprises of an onsite data center, a private cloud, and public cloud. That said, there are many benefits of a hybrid cloud model, along with a few security concerns.
Hybrid cloud security includes different practices and standards for the protection of data, applications, networks, and infrastructure as part of a complete IT architecture. Let’s get a more in-depth understanding of the benefits of hybrid cloud models and the challenges associated with hybrid cloud security and how enterprises can fix them.
Hybrid clouds allow companies to choose where they want to place the workloads and data based on the audit, compliance, policy, and security requirements.
The various environments used within a hybrid cloud solution continue to stay unique and exist as separate entities. However, the migration between them takes place using containers or encrypted application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable transmission of workloads and resources. The architecture includes separate yet, connected elements that allow enterprises to use the private cloud for more critical and sensitive workloads and the public cloud for more standard workloads.
Besides, with exponentially increasing reliance on mobile solutions, enterprise apps have also become a growing priority majorly to yield desirable returns. Considering just how much apps earn in today’s time, enterprises are motivated more than ever before. They want to invest in the hybrid cloud security to make their apps safer for the users and themselves. Let’s look at more reasons that are making companies choose hybrid cloud solutions:
Despite the many benefits of hybrid cloud solutions like cost-effectiveness and allowing users to leverage the best benefits the two unique structures of private and public cloud have to offer, there are several concerns and challenges that companies face when using Hybrid cloud solutions.
For example, what prevents some companies from cloud migration is security concerns. Even though private cloud data centers might just be located on the company premises, they will still follow the model of cloud computing. The data in the private cloud is accessible through the company’s personal IT network infrastructure, which means it’s possibly vulnerable to issues like data leak, infringements, and eavesdropping.
Let’s look at an overview of some major hybrid cloud security challenges and how enterprises can fix them:
Network transmissions and data are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle or hijack attacks and eavesdropping that can lead to the third party individuals becoming a proxy to the internal communication by impersonating endpoints. Hence, mobility division managers of enterprises must encrypt their communication and data transmission to prevent any security incursions.
Besides, companies can integrate a reliable VPN, using cryptographic protocols and include endpoint authentication to shield transmissions from such attacks especially on their private cloud parameters. They can use SSL/ TLS to encrypt all communication and manage server authentication.
Poor management of data redundancy puts your hybrid cloud system, IT infrastructure, and enterprise at risk. It can create more problems and challenges for your companies if you don’t have smartly distributed redundant copies of data across multiple data centers or servers. Having a proper system to distribute data will help mitigate the costs and damages that business has to bear in case of any malfunction in one of the data centers.
