Obligatory Preventive Arrangements While Deploying Hybrid Cloud

Discussing about the cloud technology, it has the capability to offer cost-effective as well as sensitive solutions both. Business organizations looking for monetary benefits go for public cloud services. On other end, those have critical operational requirements, opt for private cloud technology. Hybrid cloud model has both of the features and can serve most of the needs of business organizations in an ultimate manner.

The most remarkable advantage of hybrid cloud environment is that it can help to diminish CAPEX (capital expenditure) of the organization at the same time it can keep the organizations data safe from internal and external attacks.

High security arrangements are necessary in a hybrid cloud environment as the surface exposed to possible threats is enlarged due to intermixing public and private cloud models.

Here are certain best practices to diminish possible threats while using public cloud service along with private cloud.

  1. Safety of virtual machines: There are no limited boundaries of hybrid cloud environment. Flexibly, it extends through numerous clouds including the private clouds available on-premise. Due to this reason, virtual machines require a level of self security to protect the sensitive data moving in the cloud environments created by several cloud service providers.
  2. Multi-layered protection: Multi-layered protection should be provided to virtual machines with the help of certain tools such as firewall, IDS/IPS etc.
  3. Control of traffic: Appropriate guidelines should be there for continuous traffic monitoring between the various virtual machines. Instead of providing direct entrance to coming traffic an on-premise gateway should be used to manage the unwanted entrees.
  4. Encryption of data: Considering the security reasons, organizations using the cloud technology should use the powerful methods of data encryption in order to save their data from the possible assaults. To ensure the integrity and security of the data, organization should have logical policies to manage the encryption keys. It is recommended to retain the ownership of encryption keys to sustain a difference in between the duties of business organization and public cloud service providers. Advantage of having the ownership of encryption keys permits the organization to freely move between the various cloud vendors and disable a vendor lock in. In other words, the organization has the full control to apply encryption in its private as well as public cloud both.
  5. Security management: Security in a hybrid cloud environment should be managed by the organization itself who is arranging the hybrid environment for its business. Perimeter to the public cloud should be extended securely in a controllable manner by the organization either by using a third-party tool or a single sign-on tool.
  6. Regulatory fulfillment: Businesses organization deploying the hybrid cloud environment must recognize the significance of security regulations and policies when they are moving from private to hybrid cloud environments. Organizations must be aware of the changes in security regulations and policies while moving from private to hybrid cloud. Companies can accumulate certain proofs for example, audit logs to recognize the change and its influence. These accumulated proofs should be properly stored outside the public cloud environment. An auditor should also be there who can understand well the changing dynamics of the environment.

Where hybrid clouds can be deployed?

Due to certain special features of both private and public clouds, hybrid cloud models could be deployed in several cases. Some of them are mentioned as follows:

Hybrid cloud environments could be arranged for those purposes where private cloud is needed to secure more significant applications and exposing the non-critical applications. For example, if a company is involved into production, testing and development of certain products and services. Then it is recommended that the company should use public cloud for testing and development of its products and services. And for implementation of products within the organization, company should use private cloud due to security reasons.

Hybrid cloud model can be used in case of cloud bursting. In this case, any application running on private clouds could be dynamically shifted to private clouds to meet a sudden demand. For example, if the traffic at a retail company suddenly increases on holidays then in order to meet rapid shopping requirements, retail company has to switch from private to public clouds.

Featured images:
  • License: Creative Commons image source

By Aditi Tyagi

Aditi Tyagi, Editor-in-chief at MyRealData loves to write about QuickBooks Hosting and her keyboards spend most of the time in describing how cloud hosting is changing the way accountants and other business professionals work. When she is not writing about the ‘cloud’, she spends her leisure time reading novels.