Organizations must take into consideration maintaining connectivity and security before shifting their core business applications to the public cloud. Just because your competitors are shifting to the cloud, that doesn’t mean you should also do that – it’s not that simple. Maintaining the security of the network across the hybrid cloud is still an area that’s developing with several challenges being faced throughout.
IT teams face several issues in their efforts to unite security policy management across public and on-premise cloud environments. The corporate network security policy cannot be extended that easily to the public cloud. Most of the organizations that deploy business apps in the cloud are not aware of the tools they should be using to handle their network security policies post-deployment. So, it’s not possible to shift to a hybrid IaaS environment overnight. It’s something that calls for a lot of preparation and cautious management for security assurance. Here are few tips that can help in forming a migration strategy.
Reasons to Incorporate IaaS
Technological advancements in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) have led to many revolutionary changes in the business world. With this, several businesses have a way of devising more customizable cloud strategies, which are more appropriate to their specific business requirements. IaaS certainly offers a competitive edge to every business that exploits it.
For several companies, a customized IaaS solution has proved to be the best way to go. So, if you want your business to stay on the cloud technology’s cutting edge, it’s time to opt for IaaS. This way, your business can benefit from everything that cloud computing has to provide. Here are few reasons that can seem compelling enough to include this as a part of your technology game plan.
Reasonably-priced computing
Irrespective of whether your business is just a startup or already well-established, the upfront costs are usually less or nil with the cloud and IaaS. Businesses can benefit from the computing technology without any significant investments since there’s no need for hardware or onsite maintenance and these services are scalable. Similarly, the benefits of IaaS are regarded to be operational expenditures against capital expenditures. In simple words, you need not invest in hardware as you would do in a conventional onsite IT framework, thus giving your business a chance to kick-start and run faster.
Hassle-free flexibility
IaaS is referred to as a service since your business can select the technological parts as required. Irrespective of whether your business needs hardware, servers, enhanced computing abilities, or storage, it’s as flexible as your business wants it to be. A majority of cloud providers provide various components of IaaS through a pay-per-use model, permitting unlimited cloud services customization.
Furthermore, the flexibility of IaaS implies your business can develop a computing model, which performs well within your particular computing environment.
Reliable disaster recovery
Some of the main concerns of many businesses are data breaches, system crashes, and other such digital disasters. IaaS offers businesses highly reliable disaster recovery through consolidated cloud structures. Your staff can access all computing infrastructure aspects from any place when disaster hits since the monitoring and maintenance of these infrastructures take place offsite.
Excellent scalability
You might have heard about cloud scalability, but cloud providers that provide IaaS services fetch scalability to a completely new level. With such a service, your business can decrease or increase computing services depending on the use of particular applications. Apart from the flexibility and cost benefits of the cloud, scalability is also a great advantage. Whether your business faces an upsurge in its storage requirements or a slump in hardware needs, IaaS facilitates scaling in any direction.
Focusing on the current business
Your business can focus on day-to-day responsibility as the IaaS and cloud come in a complete infrastructure package. IaaS providers can deal with everything from expanding your storage needs to expanding the infrastructure, allowing businesses to shift their concentration off IT and move to the growth of the business.
Select the proper security controls
If you want to secure public cloud network access, there are three ways. The first is to use commercial firewalls, though the functionality and support level differs to a great extent between different providers. The best part of this option is unified management with the corresponding on-premise firewall, while scalability, cost, and a limited set of features are some downsides.
Alternatively, few cloud providers offer their security controls, which are usually free and offer good functionality levels. On the flip side, they may not be able to offer enterprise-level management and fail to word across various cloud vendors because of the difference in their controls.
Finally, host-based firewalls can provide an efficient cross-cloud security solution, though it can come with the overhead of extra security management.
The cloud network security controls are still divided and there’s no single solution if you want to choose the best option. So, ensure to evaluate your choices carefully before choosing the best suitable controls.
Cloud visibility
Visibility is very important if you want to know what’s happening across the hybrid cloud environment. Irrespective of the chosen security controls, visibility is the key to effective migration and deployment. Ensure to use controls that offer visibility across the complete hybrid environment.
Security automation is vital
Automating security is essential to improve the process and this aspect goes hand-in-hand with cloud visibility. Security automation is the key to migrate and manage a hybrid environment successfully. The manual automation process for the management of security changes would not be able to sustain the continuous updates required across a huge, hybrid environment. Automation can help in reducing unforeseen business outages and also increases the speed of cloud application deployment.
Owning security
For easy migration to the hybrid cloud infrastructure and its successful deployment, the various teams must work jointly with the automation tools. It’s equally important to make sure that the right team leads the security efforts. Many companies are unaware of where the hybrid cloud environment’s security responsibility lies: with the IT operations, platform providers, or Information Security team. This is based on what’s best suitable for your company, though ensure that someone has the responsibility.
In a nutshell, what your business requires is a reliable IaaS solution. The best part of such a service is that it is not a predefined, rigid software package, but rather an actual infrastructure that can be customized to fit your specific business requirements. If your business is all set to enhance its technology game plan, the IaaS and the cloud are must-consider options.
These tips can help in give utmost importance to security as you assess IaaS platforms and accordingly plan to migrate to a hybrid cloud infrastructure. This can make the shift easier while ascertaining that you can keep up a strong security stance.
John J. Gregg, writer, essaywriter.nyc