Hybrid Cloud Model: 6 Security Risks and Ways to Overcome!

By Veritis

Hybrid Cloud Model: 6 Security Risks and Ways to Overcome!

Cloud computing has transformed almost every industry functioning, making critical operations easy to manage.

The skyrocketing digital trend has taken cloud adoption further, making cloud almost an essential part of every organization.

To meeting every infrastructure requirement, from low to high, the cloud has emerged in different variants as Public Cloud, Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud.

Public Cloud is serving as a general-purpose cloud for firms of all sizes, while Private Cloud is fulfilling the enterprise requirements by being a dedicated platform and Hybrid Cloud is a combination of both.

When it comes to security aspect, each of these cloud variants have their own limitations!

Public Cloud is often considered ‘less-secure’ because of its open-source nature. Private Cloud, though ‘secure’, fails to offer the robustness or versatility of the public cloud.

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That’s where the industry started looking at ‘Hybrid Cloud’ for security!

But gaining the security advantage in Hybrid Cloud depends on analyzing and addressing a few critical challenges, listed below:

6 Crucial Security Challenges to Address in Hybrid Cloud

6 Crucial Security Challenges to Address in Hybrid Cloud

1) Compliance

In a hybrid cloud computing model, data traverses between high-secure private cloud and less-secure public cloud networks. This can often cause threat to data and compliance. Moreover, the advent of data security norms like GDPR has increased the watch on regulatory and compliance standards.

So, organizations have to take extra measures to ensure compliance requirements are met. Make sure both the public and private cloud networks are meeting standard norms like GDPR and data transfer mechanism adheres to regulatory requirements.

2) Data Privacy

This is another important security challenge that can arise in a hybrid cloud model. Working with hybrid cloud demands flexibility in data movement between public and private clouds. In such cases, there are high chances that your data can fall prey to intruder attacks, challenging organization’s data privacy rules.

Measures such as endpoint verification protocol, robust VPN and strong encryption policy can encrypt and protect your data during security breach incidents.

3) Distributed Denial of Service

One of the most serious types of cyber-attack, the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is another critical challenge that usually comes from multiple sources to target a single location. These attacks have multiple sources, which makes it tough to trace and detect and typically pose high-risk factor.

To tackle this, one needs to maintain a strict monitoring system that can track inflow and outflow. This system should ideally be scalable, responsive and should be able to handle mutli-vector attacks.

4) Service Level Agreements (SLA)

Applying a hybrid cloud means you are handing over data governance and accountability to your public Cloud Service Provider (CSP). This can be a serious issue in cases of any security compromise leading to critical data loss. To avoid such issues, be extra careful in Service Level Agreements with your service provider to ensure data confidentiality. Need to understand security limitations and strictly define accountability factor.

5) Risk Management

Considering the vulnerabilities and threats, effective risk management and precautionary safety measures need to be taken to protect the organization’s Intellectual Property from potential risks. This can include using tools such as IDS/IPS to scan malicious traffic and maintaining a log monitoring system with advanced firewall and security management features.

6) Data Redundancy

It’s important to have a well-defined data redundancy policy to ensure timely back-up of critical data, in case of limited data center capabilities. This can be achieved by hosting multiple data centers from a single or multiple cloud service providers. This will also help a lot during data center outages.

Moreover, methods like Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) will also help a lot to block unauthorized user access to important data.

On an EndNote
Infrastructure expansion should never lead to compromise on security. If you are thinking on these lines for a hybrid cloud setup, then it’s time to have ‘security’ on top of other priorities while welcoming the new operating infrastructure of your choice.

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