Hybrid cloud security is defined as the protection of data, applications, and infrastructure associated with a hybrid cloud. It ensures data security at rest and in transit and provides orchestration controls across various cloud providers and on-premises elements. This article discusses the top 10 best practices to manage hybrid cloud security challenges in 2021.
Table of Contents
- What Is Hybrid Cloud Security?
- Hybrid Cloud Security Challenges
- Top 10 Best Practices to Manage Hybrid Cloud Security Challenges in 2021
What Is Hybrid Cloud Security?
Hybrid cloud security is the protection of data, applications, and infrastructure associated with a hybrid cloud. It ensures data security at rest and in transit and provides orchestration controls across various cloud providers and on-premises elements.
Hybrid cloud security is the process of protecting infrastructure and data linked to a company’s IT systems. It is referred to as hybrid cloud security as it can manage several IT systems at once. However, it must include at least one private or public cloud to be considered a hybrid environment.
The hybrid environment extracts advantages from on-premise, private cloud, and public cloud services to give businesses more flexibility. It also provides enterprises with a choice to process information with greater speed and agility through cloud expansion.
Although hybrid cloud security seems more complicated than managing individual public or private clouds, they still have the same security needs. The security concerns of any hybrid cloud revolve around three primary components:
1. Administrative security
Administrative security involves documented rules and procedures. These include risk assessment processes, disaster recovery plans, data protection policies, and employee training. The administrative aspect of a hybrid cloud can be addressed by determining the following:
- People in charge of the hybrid cloud security system at an organization.
- Training and planning required to ensure that the concerned people can keep the data secure and protect against a security breach.
2. Physical security
In the case of public cloud components, physical security is the provider’s responsibility. On the other hand, for a private cloud setting, your in-house infrastructure should have tools such as cameras, locks, limited physical access, and a controlled environment to keep physical security intact. The physical aspects of a hybrid cloud can be addressed by noting the following points:
- Hardware associated with hybrid security cloud.
- Policies to ensure if it’s safe and secure throughout.
3. Technical security
To ensure robust data protection and prevent data breaches, various security measures and protocols must be put in place. These include:
- Encryption: Here, data in transit needs different encryption methods than data at rest.
- Virtual private networks (VPNs): VPNs provide secure connections between components running in different environments.
- Other security measures: Use of role-based access control, change monitoring, reliable data backup, endpoint security, and multi-factor authentication.
The technical parameters of a hybrid setup can be taken care of by handling the following:
- Controls in place to protect your hybrid cloud system.
- Installing network authentications and encryptions to protect against security breaches in your cloud premises.
Also Read: Cloud Security Basics: AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure & OracleOpens a new window
Hybrid Cloud Security Challenges
Today, hybrid cloud environments are the new normal. According to a 2020 survey by O’Reilly, around 39% of global businesses are already using hybrid cloud. This number is only expected to rise in the future. Hybrid clouds are becoming standard operating procedures for most organizations. According to International Data Corporation’s (IDC) March 2020 report, more than 90% of global enterprises will rely on hybrid clouds by 2022.
Cloud Adoption – Survey (2020)
Source: O’ReillyOpens a new window
While hybrid clouds can provide significant benefits, effective deployment of these environments can pose a challenge. Hybrid environments are considerably more complex than pure cloud or on-premise environments. With a hybrid setup, organizations need additional resources to manage visibility, configuration, integration tasks, analysis, and networking control, which is otherwise unnecessary. The four most common hybrid cloud challenges are covered below.Â
1. Migration and configuration
The complexity of a hybrid environment makes it difficult to ensure that your configurations are standardized and secure against threats. According to the 2020 State of Hybrid Cloud Security report by FireMon, all survey respondents (522 IT and security professionals) considered misconfigurations or wrong setup, unauthorized access, and ransomware and malware top three hybrid cloud security threats.
Hence, organizations need to consider policies that are applied uniformly and yield the expected performance for their deployment. Businesses also need to take care while migrating their data and applications. The best way to ensure a smooth migration and optimal configuration is to employ a robust cloud migration strategy. Such strategies allow secure delivery of assets and maintain their integrity.
2. Monitoring
Hybrid clouds provide diverse services, which makes monitoring them challenging. Cloud services generally provide monitoring tools. However, these tools are not compatible with existing solutions, and as such, do not integrate easily. Besides, using these tools typically requires accessing cloud dashboards, which are inefficient for security teams.Â
3. Data protection
Hybrid solutions transfer data between on-premise and cloud resources. Every such data transfer puts the data at risk of corruption, interception, or loss. Additionally, cloud access requires internet connectivity. This implies that data is potentially accessible by anyone with an internet connection. Hence, data in transit and data associated with an internet-enabled device are vulnerable to external attacks.
4. Compliance concerns
Hybrid clouds pose significant compliance challenges regarding data movement. For example, organizations at all levels need to adhere to data sovereignty laws and GDPR compliance rules, even in a small and simple hybrid environment. While in highly regulated sectors such as healthcare, government, and finance, a small glitch in following compliance norms can lead to severe fines or even lawsuits.
Also Read: What Is Cloud Storage: Private, Public, Hybrid and Community Cloud Storage
Top 10 Best Practices to Manage Hybrid Cloud Security Challenges in 2021
Embracing a hybrid cloud environment can be challenging for any business or organization. However, following these best practices can help businesses adopt it with ease. Let’s take a look at each one in detail.
Best Practices to Manage Hybrid Cloud Security Challenges in 2021
1. Address interoperability issues
A business can reap benefits from the fabric of a hybrid cloud plan by bringing in new platforms and technologies alongside existing solutions. With such an arrangement, an organization can exercise cloud’s flexibility and scalability while continuing to use existing tech portfolios. However, this integration of hybrid cloud environments exposes the interoperability paradigm. The cloud platform needs to address how the new hybrid cloud setup will work seamlessly with existing solutions and how the system and its components can be configured securely.
To come to terms with these challenges, businesses need to consider interoperability variables at the beginning of the architecture phase. They need to have the right expertise and a strong technical team to answer such a conundrum and help shape their plan. Such involvement of experts can propel the hybrid cloud strategy from a concept to the execution stage. Additionally, both business and security goals will be met along the way.
2. Enable security automation and real-time visibility
As environments turn to clouds, security monitoring and intelligence need to expand their outreach. In a hybrid cloud setting, manual procedures to review and contextualize security data are ill-suited for identifying anomalies as quickly as necessary to mitigate damages. Hence, security automation can significantly benefit hybrid cloud environments. This calls for configuring various devices on the network to produce relevant logs and security data. A central system needs to be designed to intake, process, and give close real-time threat visibility.
This can further be supported by the presence of expert security analysts, as they play a crucial role in securing a hybrid cloud environment. Having said that, these analysts need to have in-depth knowledge of both on-premise and cloud technologies. They also need to be familiar with designing and optimizing the scripts behind the automation, thereby aiding them to investigate incidents in the hybrid cloud environment based on the need.
3. Address data security concerns
A wide range of data security questions arise when you plan to design a hybrid cloud environment. Today’s data security laws, such as HIPAA, GDPR, and the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, have put stringent data protection policies in place. Though compliance can be complex, a well-thought-out and sorted hybrid cloud plan can help a business tackle this challenge head-on.
Best security practices and modern data security laws demand data encryption, both at rest and in transit. A hybrid cloud plan needs to consider the business’s complex data processing needs and include a design for a secure and available connection between on-premise infrastructure and cloud infrastructure. This can be achieved if businesses employ some data and services on-premise and others in the cloud.
4. Exercise the principle of least privilege
The principle of least privilege refers to allowing applications and users to access only those resources and data that are absolutely required. Such limitation assists in preventing users from accessing privileged data, thereby limiting the damage caused if credentials are compromised in worst-case scenarios.
To further enhance security, you should consider permissions of role-based categories. This makes permission management simpler and enables you to reduce the number of power users. It will also cut down possible threat profiles in the event of an account compromise or misuse.
Identity and access management (IAM) policies also answer questions related to data security. Strong IAM policies ensure proper restriction of access to information. Implementing IAM correctly in a hybrid cloud environment requires a certain level of expertise since on-premise and cloud solutions implement IAM differently. However, when used correctly, the granular policy can increase data security by enacting the concept of least privilege more rigorously.
5. Ensure regular audit of systems
On the deployment of your hybrid cloud, you may be tempted to simply trust your configurations. However, blind trust can prove dangerous. Cloud services and default settings can change frequently, similar to your needs.
In a cloud, audit data is much more readily available via well-defined API frameworks. Organizations can easily adopt continuous audit and assessment strategies by leveraging these APIs and cloud vendor’s existing audit functionality. It also improves overall security, risk, and audit posture.
Audits can help identify misconfigurations on the go and help in correct issues if any. Audits can also help optimize performance, thereby enabling you to identify and correct bottlenecks or cloud provisioning issues. Additionally, for data or assets that fall under compliance regulations, audits are often required for compliance.
6. Secure all endpoints
Endpoints refer to externally facing devices that are operational on your network. These devices include smart devices, workstations, routers, and web portals. With a hybrid cloud environment, the number of such endpoints is expected to be significantly more than in a private or public cloud setting. Thus, with each endpoint, the attack surface area inevitably increases. This can put your data and systems at higher risk.
To reduce this risk and protect against an attack, you need to protect your endpoints. This implies successful implementation of firewalls, access controls, antivirus, and endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions. Protection tools should comprehensively cover the entire network and scale alongside your resources.
Also Read: What Is Public Cloud? Learn the Basics of AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud
7. Use a comprehensive monitoring system
When running hybrid systems, such as VMware hybrid cloud or Microsoft Azure, a rule of thumb is not entirely trusting the public cloud alone. No network infrastructure or software system is error-free. Hence, it’s vital to keep an eye on any suspicious movements over the hybrid cloud network.
With a comprehensive monitoring system, you can keep a tab on how your network is performing, vulnerabilities in the network, entry points for intruders, and potential attack surfaces exposed to external threats, in worst cases. Businesses can set up end-to-end monitoring to capture your ingress and egress data traffic. Costs of hybrid cloud setups can rapidly scale, so it also becomes essential to keep an eye on issues potentially making your cloud infrastructure less efficient.
8. Create backup and disaster recovery strategies
Similar to a pure on-premise environment, a hybrid cloud requires backup and recovery plans. One advantage of a cloud solution is that the offered services come with built-in data duplication or recovery tools. But these tools only apply to cloud data. In case you are retaining data or applications on-premise, you still need to arrange for duplication.
It’s important to store duplicates in multiple regions. This technique protects the system against single points of failure and provides a failover option in case of a disaster. Additionally, backups that are remote from your source data can also protect against data loss from attacks, such as ransomware.
9. Keep your process uniform across the cloud
An easy and understandable security approach leaves less room for manual error. Once the approach is fixed, ensure that your team follows the same security approach across all systems. They may be operating across various private clouds, public clouds, or hybrid infrastructure but practice consistent and uniform security strategies across platforms, which can yield the best possible results. Such methods will make your processes easier to follow and understand. It’ll also ensure that systems such as encryptions, password protection, and authorizations are implemented across every system and strengthen them all against possible security breaches.
Consider a use case where your administrative staff uses your system’s public clouds and on-premise infrastructure to manage customer data. In such a scenario, to ensure protection against data breaches, you need to ensure that password authentication and encryption are uniformly implemented across each system.
10. Assess risks and manage treatment
Security teams of a hybrid cloud setting should meet with business stakeholders to determine which assets are most essential to the business and what the potential threats against them are. This would allow the team to gauge the probability of a specific threat exploiting a vulnerability or leading to a negative business impact.
Consider an example where you determine that your online salesforce automation tool is a critical business asset that would present potentially dire consequences if it were compromised. Meanwhile, it is determined that an online backup of a low-priority development server presents a less severe risk. In such a scenario, the security team can prioritize and task more resources for the online salesforce automation tool to safeguard its security, and at the same time, employ a smaller task force for online backup of a low-priority development server.
Also read: Whaling vs. Spear Phishing: Key Differences and Similarities
In conclusion
Hybrid cloud security protects enterprise data, applications, and resources in a hybrid cloud environment. Hybrid cloud security aims to unify protection across all environments while allowing management of the cloud environment on a single pane of glass. Hybrid clouds present complex environments that require a careful approach during every step—right from migration and configuration to monitoring and data protection.Â
This does not mean that hybrid environments should not be deployed. Instead, by adopting the best practices enumerated in this article, you can properly configure and secure your hybrid cloud. You should always apply the principle of least privileges, periodically audit your hybrid ecosystem, ensure the security of all endpoints, and have backup and disaster recovery strategies in place 24×7.
Which best practices are you following to manage hybrid cloud security challenges? Comment below or let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!