Hybrid Cloud Security Challenges
Enterprises have made huge investments on on-premise infrastructure and fear losing their substantial investment to some third-party production application like the public cloud. In such a scenario, the hybrid model, which encompasses the benefits of both the private on-premise infrastructure and the public cloud, can be utilized. But as in both the models, even the hybrid cloud model needs some security issues to be addressed. As enterprises analyze their business and technical hurdles, they need to keep some aspects of hybrid cloud security challenges in mind, as follows:
- Lack of Data Redundancy: Public cloud model works on the feature that it is accessible anytime and anywhere and the service providers ensure that their infrastructure follows it. But sometimes, somehow, there arise problems that are inevitable. The enterprise may be left with a single data center running all the apps in case of a well-publicized outage. Hence, a proper redundancy plan is required so that the apps are not left to run in a single data center. When the redundant copies are not distributed across the data centers, then this can pose a serious cloud security risk to the hybrid cloud and this is where the cloud architects need to implement redundancy using multiple data centers from a single provider, multiple public cloud providers, or the hybrid cloud. It becomes difficult to move virtual machine instances between large data sets than data centers. Hence, enterprises can improve business continuity with the help of the hybrid cloud by using multiple data centers from a single cloud provider thereby mitigating the security risk.
- Compliance: Compliance issue is quite a challenge in a hybrid cloud model. Here, the enterprises need to ensure that their public cloud and the on-premise infrastructure are compliant to the security protocols and also that the coordination of the two clouds or the hybrid cloud model is also compliant. If an enterprise works with the payment card data, then it has to ensure that both its internal systems and the cloud infrastructure are in compliance with the rules and regulations of the PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). Also, they have to show that the sensitive data that moves across the two models are safeguarded and secured. This means that they need to ensure that all the security protocols are in place when the card data gets transferred from a docile private cloud database to the less secure public cloud storage.
- Poor Service Agreements: Usually, the public cloud service provider is the one who will meet all the expectations of the service-level agreement (SLA) between them and the enterprise. But, enterprises suffer when it comes to the case of their own on-premise infrastructure. The organizations need to be work on it and assess its performance under all workloads. The problems that may arise due to the integration of the public and private cloud models should be assessed and corrected.
- Risk Management: For the admin in the IT department of an enterprise, a hybrid cloud environment is something new where they do not have much knowledge and experience. Hybrid cloud computing requires the use of new application programming interfaces and complex network configurations that introduce newer security threats. Hence, risk management is an issue that could disrupt the smooth working of the hybrid cloud system and hamper its security.
- Security Management: The enterprises need to allocate sufficient time and resources in knowing the intricacies and challenges of the integration issues. The existing cloud security protocols like the authentication, access management, and authorization need to work in both the environments.
CASB to the Rescue from Hybrid Cloud Security Challenges
The hybrid cloud security challenges can be overcome either by having Cloud Access Security Broker controls in both the clouds and keep them synchronized or provide its single integrated service that can run in both of them. CASB solutions help a great deal in overcoming these challenges and have a safer and securer cloud run experience. Data transfers across both private and public clouds have to be safeguarded. The CASB solutions help in integrating any security challenges thus faced and keep the sensitive data secure while helping enterprises achieve compliance.