Nowadays, almost every business has turned to digital ways of running their daily activities. With the rapid growth of technology, there seems to be a massive interest among businesses to advance their technology infrastructure to fit in.
Let’s take the recent case of the Covid-19 pandemic as an example. When it wasn’t possible to meet in formal offices following the social distance regulations, businesses were forced to upgrade their systems to allow for effective remote work. And a large number of businesses have adopted cloud computing and related technology, but there is a problem. Cyber security issues have become rampant in the recent past, putting many businesses at high risk.
Are your business operations secure both offline and online? Having a robust hybrid cloud security strategy can help cushion your business against all manner of cybercrime vulnerabilities.
Keep reading to learn what hybrid cloud security is and how you can develop one for your business.
What Is Hybrid Cloud?
A hybrid cloud refers to a cloud computing architecture that allows effective coordination between on-premise and cloud infrastructures. With the hybrid cloud architecture, you enjoy flexible deployment options and seamless sharing of workloads across public and private clouds.
Most business people share a common misconception that cloud providers take care of all the necessary cloud security issues. The truth is that cloud security ought to be the responsibility of every party on board.
The primary reason why your business needs hybrid cloud security is that your infrastructure, applications, and data, whether the public cloud or on-premises cloud, are vulnerable to cyber-attacks. The right strategy will protect all your business’s operations, including data management, sharing of workloads, and processes across different IT environments.
5 Top Steps to Developing a Hybrid Cloud Strategy
Here are the steps you need to develop robust hybrid cloud security for your business:
1. Standardize Your Business Processes
If your business and security processes are not standardized between private and public cloud, you are leaving many security gaps and human errors. The majority of past and biggest data breaches resulted from configuration errors on the client public clouds.
You can avoid such instances in your business by setting up strict security measures. For example, you need to have consistent procedures around your administrator passwords, whether on public or on-premises clouds.
2. Maintain Optimal Data Encryption
The basic security measure for your business is to keep all data encrypted, whether at rest or in transit. Usually, the majority of cloud service providers have this as a service. However, what you get here should not make you comfortable that your company data is safe.
You need to consistently coordinate data encryption between all your clouds – private and public. It would be best if you focused more on the data moving from private to public clouds.
3. Adopt a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan
Have you ever thought of what would happen in case of a data center or service outage? For most companies, business would come to a standstill. It is at such instances when it becomes necessary to have a backup plan.
With an effective disaster recovery and business continuity plan, you will still enjoy smooth operations even when there are data center or service outages. Such a policy involves the implementation of image-based and automated data backups. Where necessary, you can host your whole disaster recovery site remotely or in the cloud.
4. Set Identity and Access Management Policies
If you want to protect your assets in private and public environments, you need a proper identity and access management policy. The Identity and Access Management (IAM) is extendable across all the environments.
With proper identity and access management strategies, you only allow the designated users access to your company information. Such an approach keeps any unauthorized persons from stealing data and other information.
5. Verify Everything
One of the reasons why security breaches are rampant is the laxity in security implementation. Nowadays, data breaches can occur via traditional network parameters. Such conventional perimeters are no longer effective.
Usually, slight negligence in the security measures as your team shares workloads across different locations and infrastructures could cost you a lot. Focus on protecting access to any data source or virtual asset by embracing a “never trust, verify everything” strategy across your systems.
Get Started With a Robust Hybrid Cloud Security Strategy Today!
Data breaches and losses can be costly to your business. Do you want more security controls, efficient connectivity, greater flexibility, improved business continuity, and accelerated innovation? It is high time you adopted a strong hybrid cloud security strategy.
A robust hybrid security strategy shouldn’t be complicated – all you need is a policy that secures your business data, tools, roles, procedures, and practices. Rethink your business process standardization, limit access to certain data resources, consistently encrypt all your data, and embrace an effective disaster recovery and business continuity plan.
