Any time a business introduces cloud, it introduces new security considerations. Those new considerations are magnified with hybrid cloud, because your internal systems and cloud systems aren’t separate any longer.
• More connections mean more points to attack. The more integrated your public and private cloud, the more points a hacker can target. The APIs that enable communication between services are often not very secure.
• More connections mean more vulnerability. Connected systems are more vulnerable. An attack that’s successful isn’t limited to your cloud systems or your internal systems. An attacker who gains access to credentials on one platform may be able to use the same credentials to access the other platform.
• Security policies may not be consistent. It’s hard to ensure that policies are implemented and enforced consistently on multiple platforms. The tools on different platforms may have different capabilities or require different settings in order to achieve the same result. This can affect account privileges, firewall rules, and other security settings.
• Data is vulnerable. Hybrid cloud requires sharing data across platforms. Because it’s hard to keep track of cloud infrastructure and workloads, it’s difficult to know if a data transfer serves a necessary business purpose. Every data transfer is a potential data leak. When you want to delete data, it’s hard to know whether you’ve deleted all copies. You also don’t know how long the cloud provider retains their own copies of your data.
• Encryption keys may be insecure. Data can be made more secure if you use encryption, but in some clouds, the cloud provider controls the encryption keys.
• Solutions may not scale. The tools and policies you implement when you have just a few connections between clouds may not scale adequately to protect you when you have tens of connected clouds.
• Compliance is harder to achieve. The more environments you support, the harder it is to consistently apply compliance policies across them. Because you lack control over infrastructure in the public cloud, changes made without your knowledge can change your security and compliance status.
Most of these considerations apply to a multicloud environment, as well as hybrid cloud environments. If your multicloud architecture includes communication between the public cloud environments, it’s even more important to fully understand the security tools available in each provider. Take advantage of each provider’s tools that recommend best practices and identify weaknesses of your security settings within that cloud. By making every cloud as secure as possible, you can make your overall hybrid or multicloud environment as secure as possible.
Get help tackling the challenges of securing a hybrid cloud or multicloud environment from VAST IT Services. Contact us to learn more about keeping your infrastructure safe, whether you have no cloud, hybrid cloud, or multiple cloud environments.
Discover Additional Hybrid Cloud Resources:
7 Challenges You Need to Overcome to Succeed with Hybrid Cloud
Choosing the Right Cloud Provider for Your Workloads
Give Every Application Its Ideal Environment With Hybrid Cloud
