Security & Compliance Considerations for Cloud Deployments

Most all organizations have realized they need to embrace the cloud to address their diverse business needs. In fact, all things hybrid is everywhere. However, determining the best approach is not easily answered, as it varies for every organization. For this reason, hybrid cloud has emerged as a rapidly-growing viable and agile solution, as it offers a mix of private and public clouds to meet an organization’s diverse requirements.

There are, however, barriers to hybrid cloud deployments related to security and compliance. A common concern centers around how to migrate to a hybrid cloud model without putting sensitive data at risk.

Current State of Hybrid Cloud Security and Compliance

According to a report by 451 Research, the primary security challenges identified by IT and cybersecurity practitioners are:

• Maintaining controls for secure access and granting authorization
• Ensuring hybrid cloud security of data and workloads
• Securing data in third-party environments using encryption and tokenization

In its survey of 250 IT executives, 451 Research found that:

• 16 percent of organizations were in a preliminary investigation phase of hybrid cloud adoption
• 42 percent were actively evaluating and testing
• 23 percent had a workload subset run exclusively in the cloud, while 19 percent had a workload subset run in a hybrid architecture environment

The organizations still evaluating hybrid cloud architectures found that either the cloud vendors didn’t satisfy compliance requirements or had perceived security risks. Of those who adopted hybrid clouds, 47 percent felt the service provider addressed their security and compliance needs in a comprehensive way. Another 36 percent were unsatisfied however, stating the cloud provider only partially addressed their requirements.

Effective Approaches to Hybrid Cloud Deployments

Securing the hybrid cloud is more complex than traditional environments and requires upfront analysis and planning to ensure a successful deployment. The top best practices include:

• Extending information security best practices to the hybrid cloud: It’s critical to secure data both in transit and at rest as well as replicate access management policies.
• Implementing centralized management and policy automation for compliance: Proper management and administrative tools must be used to automate logging and auditing.
• Following risk-mitigation: These approaches include workload segmentation or micro-segmentation, consolidated visibility, enforcement of administrative controls at the hypervisor tier, and integrating identity and access management.

The concerns related to hybrid cloud adoption can be addressed with the right mix of tools, policies, and experience. Organizations who are learning to successfully balance compliance and security requirements with risk mitigation are able to fully take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of the hybrid cloud architecture.

Need help building out your cloud plan?

OneNeck IT Solutions works with you to understand your unique business needs and requirements to help you define the right cloud infrastructure for your workloads. We conduct a thorough Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Assessment that covers all the bases to complete a successful migration to the cloud, including workload analysis, bandwidth analysis and end-user experience analysis. Contact us to learn more.

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