Almost every business has now moved beyond a ‘one cloud fits all’ approach. They are using multi-cloud service providers to satisfy business needs like data backup, disaster recovery, global coverage, and application resiliency. While a multi-cloud approach provides numerous benefits, there are some pitfalls that CIOs need to be aware of as well.
According to the Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, 93% of businesses have a multi-cloud strategy in place, whereas 87% practice a hybrid cloud strategy. Furthermore, on average, companies use 2.2 public and private clouds, and cloud adoption continues to take place at a rapid pace.
Handling and securing various private and public cloud workloads and environments is a tedious job. Though multi-cloud adoption has myriad advantages, it adds extra layers of management complexity, particularly when cloud services are added in an impromptu manner rather than planning it well in advance.
Most businesses connect their clouds utilizing their on-premises secure data center WAN edge, which hinders the capabilities of multi-cloud. This approach can result in high deployment complexity, costly connectivity, and inconsistent network performance.
Also Read: Protecting SSH Keys in Multi-Cloud Operations
Key Measures
As businesses continue to develop across several Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud providers, their networking and security architectures need to grow significantly so that they can provide a stable way to connect their applications. Organizations need to have robust solutions while deploying applications across multiple IaaS clouds to streamline operations and mitigate their cybersecurity risks.
Software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) can expedite the adoption of multi-cloud deployments while simplifying WAN infrastructure and cut down connectivity costs. In order to be successful, businesses must keep SD-WAN safe and secure. Let’s take a look at the following key factors for securing multi-cloud environments.
Common Framework
For multi-cloud deployments, having exclusive architectures built on application programming interfaces (APIs), frameworks, and toolsets that are specific to each one is a real challenge.
Companies need to have one common networking, security policy, and execution framework. The right multi-cloud solution will help businesses with a networking and security architecture that spreads over clouds. Moreover, it makes use of the native features and functions of every cloud, eliminates that functionality with the help of APIs, and then manages these connections using automation more powerfully.
Application Awareness
The most fundamental transport mechanisms in the networking technologies that help to connect multiple clouds are quite oblivious about the several distinct types of applications available on the clouds. Therefore, the network has to be application-aware in order to deliver stable performance for a company’s critical applications and also to maximize the usage of available resources.
A Secure SD-WAN solution delivers awareness of network conditions and capacity, the potential to manage unnecessary traffic, and enhance business-critical applications. Furthermore, it also helps understand the impact on the end-user experience to boost performance and optimize costs as much as possible.
Also Read: Managing Identity in a Hybrid and Multi-Cloud World
Integrated Architecture
If networking and security break apart, multi-cloud deployments may fail to reach their full performance potential as every layer of the network uses multiple technologies from different vendors who do not communicate with each other. Hence, this approach may create gaps in coverage and make the entire ecosystem more vulnerable to attacks.
As more companies embrace multi-cloud, they require solutions that are designed to connect and secure their complex environments under a unified security fabric. An integrated networking and security architecture serves two purposes- effectiveness and efficiency. A unified Secure SD-WAN solution can provide businesses with central oversight, coordinated implementation, and integrated communications among the networking and security layers to close gaps and minimize the potential for future attacks remarkably.
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