Hybrid cloud infrastructure has gone mainstream across most enterprises.

According to Gartner, 90% of organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud model by 2020 while traditional data center outsourcing will continue to decline.

The shift toward hybrid cloud infrastructure is massive. Yet, as with any significant technology-driven change, the adoption of hybrid cloud poses many challenges to businesses: talent shortage, unoptimized infrastructures and workflows, and security, to name a few.

And security is an important one.

Although hybrid cloud infrastructure usually allows to reinforce the security practices in the IT-organization, rarely do businesses take all the required nuances into account. As a result, they fall victim to insider attacks, DDoS attacks, malware injection, phishing, and other issues designed by bad actors.

In this article, we’ll take a dive deep into the basics of hybrid cloud security and find out what security considerations businesses should be aware of when switching to hybrid cloud.

What Is Hybrid Cloud?

Hybrid cloud (also known as hybrid cloud computing) is a cloud computing environment that combines on-premises, a private cloud, and a third-party public cloud to share data & applications and to perform specific functions under the umbrella of a single organization.

Hybrid cloud takes the best of the two worlds — private/public cloud and on-premise infrastructure. Specifically:

Public cloud empowers businesses through its scalability and reliability capabilities. In the public cloud, you pay for what you use.

empowers businesses through its scalability and reliability capabilities. In the public cloud, you pay for what you use. Private cloud allows businesses to enjoy greater control and customization while keeping TCO low. In the private cloud, the data is kept behind your own firewall, which gives you more control.

allows businesses to enjoy greater control and customization while keeping TCO low. In the private cloud, the data is kept behind your own firewall, which gives you more control. On-premise solution is highly customizable and gives you a higher degree of control over the entire system. The servers are located in-house, which is great for data compliance.

Given that, hybrid cloud helps IT-organizations and businesses become more competitive in two major ways:

Utilize the capabilities of private and public clouds Keep critical and user-sensitive data on-premises

Despite these benefits, security remains a deterrent to adopting a hybrid cloud environment. Let’s find out why.

Hybrid Cloud Security Strategy: What You Need to Know

Security is an important element of any cloud strategy.

Unfortunately, hybrid cloud security is approached by many organizations without a proper strategy in place. Not only do they needlessly expose themselves to malware attacks, phishing, and data breaches, but restrict cloud scalability, which considerably hampers growth in the future.

Just because they offload certain elements of their ecosystem to the cloud, they assume that the cloud provider will handle:

Data Compliance. Compliance requirements should be looked into carefully since you, not your cloud provider, are responsible for providing the security measures in the cloud. Take this into account while designing your infrastructure and workflows across your private data center and multiple clouds.

Compliance requirements should be looked into carefully since you, not your cloud provider, are responsible for providing the security measures in the cloud. Take this into account while designing your infrastructure and workflows across your private data center and multiple clouds. Multi-cloud Management. Maintaining security policies and procedures across the entire network isn’t easy. Every cloud provider has its own rules, which aren’t always easily transferable to the other. You’ll have to invest in multi-cloud management solutions to reduce the risk of data breaches and malicious attacks.

Maintaining security policies and procedures across the entire network isn’t easy. Every cloud provider has its own rules, which aren’t always easily transferable to the other. You’ll have to invest in multi-cloud management solutions to reduce the risk of data breaches and malicious attacks. Data Visibility & Monitoring. You’re responsible for deciding where to put and store your critical data. It’s also up to you to ensure its visibility and monitoring when moving it in and out across the network.

You’re responsible for deciding where to put and store your critical data. It’s also up to you to ensure its visibility and monitoring when moving it in and out across the network. Encryption. Encryption is the easiest way to protect your sensitive data. However, since you’re dealing with a multi-tenant environment, you’ll have to encrypt it throughout the data lifecycle — in motion, in use, and at rest.

Encryption is the easiest way to protect your sensitive data. However, since you’re dealing with a multi-tenant environment, you’ll have to encrypt it throughout the data lifecycle — in motion, in use, and at rest. Scalability. While cloud providers do their best to simplify a variety of their products, tools, and services, it’s still up to you to ensure that your network can scale for growth. Your security infrastructure should be designed for growth as well.

Simply put, a hybrid cloud infrastructure is challenging to design, maintain, manage. As there are too many moving parts, security is often forgotten in the rush, which leads to a number of hybrid cloud security challenges.

To do the hybrid cloud infrastructure right, you should approach it carefully, with a central cloud team responsible for every stage of your cloud strategy.

Major Hybrid Cloud Considerations for Your Business

Many challenges that prevent the adoption of a hybrid cloud environment are mitigated once you create a central cloud team. Ensure that your team bears in mind the following considerations when planning, architecting, and implementing a hybrid cloud strategy.

1. Lack of Focus on DevSecOps

Hybrid cloud security is all about effective teamwork of your data center, networking, security, and DevOps teams.

DevOps (short for Development and Operations) allows organizations to enjoy automation and continuous feedback loops that ensure more frequent deployments, faster recovery time, and lower failure rate.

When we think hybrid cloud security, however, we should shift focus from DevOps to DevSecOps, or Security DevOps.

DevSecOps prioritizes two elements of security:

Tools. Tools help protect pipelines and processes, ensure automation, and allow for continuous security. Culture. Culture fuses security practices into the early stages of work, which allows avoiding rather than fixing errors. It allows to eliminate the divide between the security personnel and everybody else — developers, testers, Ops staff, and so on.

Given that, DevSecOps in the hybrid cloud environment is synonymous to agility and speed. It’ll help you fix errors faster, continuously plug security gaps, and bake security practices into the entire SDLC.

2. Lack of Visibility Across Different Systems

To ensure security in the hybrid cloud model, you should have a seamless monitoring and tracking system in place.

Basically, you need to understand what is going on with your architecture elements, apps, and data across every environment, and; if anything goes wrong, you should be able to track when, where, and how the error occurred.

Designing a system as such isn’t simple. According to Cavirin’s Hybrid Cloud Security survey, 37% and 32% of 250 chief information security officers (CISOs) reported issues with implementing security controls and ensuring proper cloud visibility, respectively.

In the meantime, implementing visibility is crucial to your organization’s operational performance, because:

You no longer need to rely on perimeter security approaches, which simply don’t work in multi-cloud environments but often referred to when designing and implementing security policies

It allows you to track vulnerabilities while continuously adapting your network to ever-changing compliance requirements

You gain visibility into potential threats through tools, since you know weak spots of the applied tools

It gives you a clear roadmap for auditing the network if you need to run regular checks or to demonstrate its compliance to the regulators

Visibility is a straight path to continuous monitoring; it allows you to not only look into potential and existing threats but continuously locate and mitigate them in real time.

3. No CARTA in Place

CARTA (short for continuous adaptive risk and trust assessment) is a key prerequisite for hybrid cloud security.

A monitoring and tracking system on steroids, it ensures that every element of your network remains protected in a rapidly changing environment. It predicts, prevents, detects, and responds to security issues in a continuous manner.

Simply put, CARTA enables your organization to adapt and adjust to arising issues to prevent them instead of plugging the gaps repetitively.

Bead in mind that CARTA is powered by automation, DevSecOps, and the monitoring and tracking system, where data is collected, analyzed, and processed to automatically respond to arising security concerns.

CARTA operates within the predefined policy and compliance requirements.

4. Shared Responsibility Isn’t Shared

Shared responsibility is the most important principle of cloud security.

What this principle basically says is:

The customer defines controls and security of the applications and content in the cloud; the cloud provider takes care of the security of the cloud.

In this system, the customer is responsible for network security, identity access & control, operating systems & platforms, and data encryption. The cloud provider takes care of the physical & network infrastructure, and the virtualization layer.

In other words, if you move certain parts of your network to the cloud, you’re still responsible for them. The cloud provider secures the cloud platform, but access policies, configurations, encryption, machine updates, software monitoring, and data are for you to sort out.

5. Security Tools Aren’t Properly Integrated

Security in the hybrid cloud is, first and foremost, achieved through smooth and efficient integration of all tools, including security tools in the network.

Let’s put it this way:

If your enterprise relies on a toolset that isn’t well-integrated with security tools offered by the cloud provider, you’ll have a lot of problems ahead, from insider attacks to data loss.

If you’re going to migrate your infrastructure, apps, and data to the cloud, look for platforms and tools that can be easily integrated and aligned with your data center’s security tools.

AWS Outposts: The Ultimate Hybrid Cloud Solution

Although a hybrid cloud model provides such benefits as enhanced security, reduced total cost of ownership, and flexibility, many IT leaders and decision makers still opt for on-premises. According to a report from Barracuda Networks, 62% of IT decision-makers in enterprises consider on-premise solutions to be more secure than cloud solutions.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) may have found the way to address their resistance in the security department, though.

At the AWS re:Invent Conference, AWS CEO Andy Jassy and VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger announced a product that brings a hybrid experience to on-premises —

AWS Outposts. An integrated hardware rack that will run both AWS and VMware environments, AWS Outposts is projected to hit the market in the second half of 2019.

AWS Outposts empowers data centers, colocation spaces, and on-premise facilities by bringing the full scope of AWS services to the table. The solution is great to support workloads and simplify scalability.

AWS is responsible for delivering, installing, maintaining, and supporting AWS Outposts.

In other words, if you want to enjoy all the benefits of the hybrid cloud model on-premises, AWS Outposts is a perfect option for your business.

Conclusion

Hybrid cloud is here to stay.

According to a report by MarketsandMarkets, the global hybrid cloud market is expected to grow from $44.6bn in 2018 to $97.64bn in 2023. The value of the global hybrid cloud market will more than double in five years.

Both enterprises and SMEs are rapidly switching to a cloud hybrid model. However, security is still a concern.

Hybrid cloud security can be tricky and complex. Instead of managing a confined on-premise solution, enterprises have to deal with multi-cloud environments with different approaches, rules, and regulations.

In this article, we’ve looked into the basics of cloud computing and found out what hybrid cloud security considerations to bear in mind when moving to the cloud.

If you’re looking to migrate your infrastructure, applications, and data to the cloud, contact Squadex here. We’ll help you plan, architect, implement, and maintain your hybrid cloud solution.