For years, it was expected that as enterprises discovered the benefits of cloud technology, they would quickly invest in private cloud solutions and then add public cloud only when necessary. This prediction has proven incorrect, as many enterprises are instead implementing a hybrid cloud environment. A hybrid cloud plan can optimize performance and costs, but it’s necessary for there to be a solid enterprise hybrid cloud security strategy.

In many cases, the customized approach to enterprise hybrid cloud security can seem a bit daunting, as multiple vendors and access points can add complexity to security measures. A good start for any enterprise is to address the following steps for their hybrid cloud environment:

Flexibility: The platform infrastructure should be built with hybrid cloud in mind, allowing for the centralized visibility of the full scope of solutions being accessed, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), on-premises solutions, virtual machines, and more. Flexibility also allows for the easy installation of a solution from a cloud provider’s marketplace.

Responsiveness: Security threats change and multiply on a daily basis, and the enterprise hybrid cloud security strategy must be responsive when a threat is detected. The time to implement new solutions and quickly identify changes to posture must be prioritized.

Deep discovery: The system should be able to identify new workloads swiftly as well as changes to existing workloads and then group these by function. Deep discovery should be a simple process, using existing authorization policies so that a special access identity policy isn’t required to be created every time.

Risk scoring: The system needs to be able to conduct real-time risk scoring across the infrastructure. Once assets have been identified, they must be scored. This can be done according to a variety of different sorting options, whether individually or by workload types across environments or by application.

Cloud security posture: The security plan must take into account the full range of services offered by the cloud provider, such as load balancing, storage, identity and computing. Protecting the workload is just as important as securing the cloud.

Intelligence or virtual whiteboard: It’s important to run “what-if” scenarios for your enterprise hybrid cloud security to see what the impact would be for configurations and operating systems if you were to incorporate different types of changes. Predictive analytics allow you to examine the impact of application performance interfaces (APIs) from third parties.

Securing your hybrid cloud environment takes a comprehensive strategy. eXemplify provides the support you need to minimize your vulnerability for a security breach. Contact us to learn more.