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Have you ever driven on a high road or mountain pass that’s shrouded by low cloud? You’re at the familiar controls of your vehicle, but you can’t easily see road-signs, oncoming vehicles, which way the road goes, or other dangers. 

Progress can be hazardous unless you take extra precautions. 

The feeling will be familiar to many organisations’ IT teams as they transition some of their business applications and data to the cloud.   

The majority of organsations don’t have a large, centralised cloud deployment that has completely replaced their physical networks simply because this type of wholesale migration is costly and involves a great deal of planning, resources and risk. 

Instead, most enterprises have a hybrid model that includes a mix of physical data centers and private or public clouds. 

A recent forecast from 451 Research predicted that 60% of enterprise workloads will run in the cloud by mid-2018, up from 41% today. Securing these hybrid environments is much more complex, demanding a change in mindset and approach.

IT teams usually have good visibility into and control over their on-premise networks. But when it comes to cloud environments, it’s not as easy to see and react to emerging hazards – just like driving over that high mountain road.

Clouds move closer

These security challenges are made more complex as public and private cloud services evolve.  Ever-growing numbers of enterprise devices and services are connecting to and relying on the cloud, increasing the pressure on cloud architectures.

At the same time, organisations in sectors, such as healthcare, insurance, retail and entertainment, are under pressure to deliver differentiated services across geographies and regions according to local preferences or legislation. 

Organisations can achieve greater agility and flexibility using hybrid clouds helping them respond faster to market and customer needs

Collecting and analysing real-time information provides the ability to quickly adjust to trends and customer demands but information can quickly become stale if not acted upon appropriately. Thus, bringing the processing power of the cloud closer to that “big data” allows organisations to rapidly personalise their offerings and maintain a competitive edge.

This trend demands a more advanced, decentralised and distributed hybrid cloud model, reflecting the right mix of private and public clouds that work as an extension of existing corporate systems and processes.

The end result can deliver a more efficient and agile compute model, sometimes called ‘fog computing’ since it reduces the amount of data that needs to go to the cloud for processing. But whatever name the model is given, the problem remains how IT teams get complete visibility and control over it to ensure consistent protection and enforcement of policies across all their assets and data, both on-premise and in the cloud.

Meeting the security challenges

Perhaps the biggest issue that IT teams face is that using hybrid clouds can put data and business applications beyond their traditional IT security controls, which don’t typically touch the cloud – especially public cloud environments. 

At the same time, the number of cyber threats and breaches are increasing. Once an environment is breached, attacks are able to spread laterally within the cloud infrastructure and even extend externally outwards from the cloud to on-premise networks. 

A 2016 Ponemon Institute study of cloud malware and data breaches of nearly 650 IT pros found that 31% of firms had a cloud breach and 25% did not know how the breach occurred.

It all adds up to an enlarged, complex and blurred attack surface for organisations, so they need a comprehensive solution to bridge security gaps and extend protections, visibility and control from data centers to the cloud in a way that works with the cloud’s elasticity and automation. 

The solution needs to protect the north-south traffic entering and leaving the data center to and from cloud estates giving perimeter gateway protections. 

It also needs to give robust security to mitigate east-west traffic threats within cloud environments deployable as a security VM within the environment to inspect, make visible and protect traffic and assets within the cloud. 

East-west protection should be enforced by micro-segmentation which groups resources within the cloud environment and divides them into small, protected segments with logical boundaries. 

This increases the ability to discover and contain intrusions with communication between groups and segments controlled by specific dynamic security policies.

Traffic within the data center can then be directed to virtual security gateways for deeper inspection with advanced threat prevention techniques (such as firewalling, IPS, antivirus, anti-bot and sandboxing) to stop attackers and threats attempting to move laterally from one segment or application to another.  

Management matters

The solution should also integrate agnostically with the cloud service’s management and orchestration tools to enable the right security policies to be enforced for applications and automate security management processes so that they don’t become a brake on agility in the cloud environment. 

These features delivered via an integrated, virtualised security platform, allow advanced security and threat prevention services to be dynamically deployed wherever they are needed in the hybrid environment – from the on-prem data center to public and private clouds.

In conclusion, organisations can achieve greater agility and flexibility using hybrid clouds helping them respond faster to market and customer needs. 

With the right security approach that integrates advanced protections, policy management and visibility across both on-premise networks and private and public clouds (or fogs), they can drive their IT and business processes with complete visibility and control.

(c)iStock.com/James Brey

More than half of CIOs polled by Verizon and Harvard Business Review say their use of cloud computing has improved their organisation’s competitiveness; but hybrid IT is the primary method of coping with digital transformation struggles.

The study, which polled more than 300 business and IT executives worldwide, found that 63% of organisations are pursuing a hybrid IT approach, yet a third (32%) are struggling to integrate cloud with other systems.

The top barriers preventing organisations from going deeper into cloud are, naturally, security (35%), integration with other systems (32%), and integrating multiple clouds (25%). What’s more, the report affirms the view that many organisations still use on-premises, as well as in-house, delivery for certain systems.

“It’s all about digital transformation in the enterprise: improving the customer experience and adopting new business models to respond to disruption from established rivals and new entrants, and hybrid IT is how you do that,” said Carl Lehmann, research manager in charge of enterprise architecture, integration, and business process management for the 451 Group.

Yet while this approach has its benefits – for instance, creating new business processes and customer-facing applications involving multiple cloud and non-cloud systems working together – there are drawbacks. “Few IT departments are experienced at managing this hybrid delivery model, or the network technologies required to make it work,” the report notes. “As a result, companies are beginning to partner with experienced hybrid IT providers that have the expertise and products to deliver these newer technologies and capabilities.”

The report agrees many companies are struggling with hybrid IT – “a repeatable, reliable, and consistent hybrid IT approach remains the exception rather than the rule” – but reiterates the importance of getting an orchestrated mix of systems right. Yet help is at hand. The report also notes companies are recognising the importance of outsourcing infrastructure management, in order to help them stay on top of technology change – as cited by 72% of respondents – as well as better respond to business demands (67%) and more quickly resolve problems (57%).

You can read the full report here (pdf).

(c)iStock.com/Michael Chamberlin

As demand for public cloud services continues to grow rapidly the major providers are busy developing hyperscale clouds supported by regional data centres. Both Amazon and Microsoft have announced their UK based cloud services with the goal to meet sovereignty needs while also helping organisations achieve their digital transformation objectives, allowing them to once and for all unshackle themselves from the constraints and costs of legacy IT systems.

All well and good but as was recently underlined by Gartner’s cloud adoption survey there are many enterprises out there still reticent to move forward with public cloud services until they have more assurances about performance and security. While Gartner and others clearly don’t dispute the continuing meteoric rise of public cloud there’s still much to be done to finally remove the fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding public cloud, convincing users and boardrooms that it is safe and robust, even though in the majority of cases it is already more secure than what they using today.

So what more can CIOs and service providers do to deliver the missing ‘X Factor’ that many users and boardrooms still demand before fully embracing public cloud services, let alone mixing these with their private cloud and legacy systems?

Connectivity to these cloud services is increasingly a key part of the solution. It can no longer be an afterthought and must be seriously considered from the outset, particularly for applications which are sensitive to latency issues.

Companies cannot always rely on the vagaries of the public internet which can be the weakest link of any public cloud offering. They must invest in secure circuits and MPLS networks as they make the move to using cloud services. 

The development of independent cloud gateways and exchanges to access cloud services is a relatively new development in this area as it allows the end user to separate their connectivity provider from its cloud provider.  This allows greater flexibility and more control on costs than purchasing all aspects of the solution from one provider.

Connectivity to these cloud services is increasingly a key part of the solution – it can no longer be an afterthought and must seriously be considered from the outset

Cloud gateways allow fast, highly secure virtual private network connections directly into the global public cloud network infrastructures such as Microsoft’s Azure ExpressRoute.  Otherwise it’s rather like investing in a Ferrari but one that is powered by a Morris Minor engine.  

Seamlessly plugging into these global public cloud infrastructures – comprising of subsea cables and terrestrial networks and bypassing the public internet – will increase security, reduce latency and optimise bandwidth in one fell swoop. Furthermore, with multiple interfaces, private connectivity to multiple cloud locations can be achieved and improve resilience.

Certainty and predictability

As many enterprise organisations consider move to public cloud services they are also looking at on premise and colocation data centres and how to reduce costs and improve efficiencies.  They must consider how to meet compute and storage capacity requirements in the brave new world of cloud services without compromising on security and network performance. Rightly so, since at the end of the day when it comes to cloud adoption it is the data centre’s resilience and connectivity which can make or break any cloud model.

Very often hybrid cloud deployments are the answer to these questions and with it the choice of the data centre on where to deploy the private clouds. Combining colocation, private and public cloud is increasingly coming into play by making public services more ‘palatable’ among the ‘non-believers’. It enables users to have the best of both worlds by offering the comfort blanket of retaining core legacy software systems and IT equipment, but with the added flexibility of easy access to the public cloud for accessing non-core applications and services.           

With proven security accreditations, uptime track records and SLA histories all readily available when evaluating today’s modern facilities, the new ‘holy grail’ for data centres must now be in delivering cloud providers and their users’ consistency and certainty. Where connectivity is secure and always on and latency and response times are uniformly consistent: no matter if it’s just a cloud model supporting a few hundred users nationwide, or several thousand spread across the globe. In other words, it can scale without degradation.    

Only by data centres circumnavigating the public internet with private connections can public and hybrid cloud users expect to be on the same level as private cloud. At such point any pre-existing customer engagement issues over security and consistency will quickly disappear as their users will no longer be able to tell the difference, whichever variety or combination of cloud they are using. This is when that missing ‘X Factor’ will have truly arrived.