News Feature | April 8, 2016

How To Improve Security For Hybrid Cloud Deployments

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

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Advice for helping your clients maximize their IT spend in the hybrid cloud.

As companies across industries seek to maximize their IT spend, the “hybrid cloud” is gaining momentum as the infrastructure of choice based on cost effectiveness, flexibility, and scalability. In fact, Gartner has predicted that 50 percent of enterprises will be using hybrid cloud environments by 2017. It is a logical option for organizations that have deployed private clouds but are seeking to expand and take full advantage of the scale and convenience of the public cloud.

But, despite the advantages of a hybrid cloud approach, security remains the number one barrier to adoption. Many companies are challenged by the role they need to play in securing data, particularly in light of the fact that public cloud providers only offer protection up to a certain point. If not properly addressed, your clients could face security gaps and system performance issues.

When selling cloud services to your clients, Chris Johnson, Chair of the CompTIA IT Security Community and CEO of Untangled Solutions, says it helps to explain the features and benefits differently, deconstruct your cloud offerings into clear focus areas that highlight your competitive features, make your vendors do the heavy, customer-pre-sales lifting, differentiate your offerings to create a distinction form your competition, and make best practices your mantra.

According to this Trend Micro blog post, “The hybrid cloud is a key component of the Software-Defined Data Center, where the entire infrastructure of the data center is managed and controlled through intelligence software systems as opposed to hardware. It means compute, storage, and networking capabilities can be provisioned in seconds rather than days or weeks. But it also requires software-defined security to fully leverage these advantages.”

Successfully selling the hybrid cloud to your clients means understanding their needs as well as their concerns and addressing them clearly and concisely. The Trend Micro post also underscores that when investing in the security for hybrid cloud deployments, you should help your IT manager and executive clients consider the following capabilities:

  • scale up and down with infrastructure; automatically installing security with new computers
  • automatically adapt security policy to match the changing software footprint on virtual machines
  • scale out/in between cloud elements through a single management infrastructure and console — from the data center to public cloud platform and vice versa
  • scale out/in with unified set of security policies independent of the cloud platform being used
  • deep technical integration with the platform for ease of deployment and management; including automated provisioning of security software, integrated billing etc.