Three Common Hybrid Cloud Security Challenges and How Anthos Solve Them

A perfect blend of hybrid cloud along with the existing IT infrastructure provides the performance, flexibility, scalability, and cost-savings that organizations need today to compete. 

Although hybrid-cloud architecture is the right solution for organizations, the concern about security, data protection, and compliance still remains a question. So, with the introduction of Google Anthos, many administrators are asking about the solution provided by Anthos to overcome the enterprise hybrid cloud security challenges. 

Below we’ve covered the three common challenges that one face with hybrid cloud security and how those can be tackled with the help of Google Anthos. Let’s check them out.

1. Security Compliance and Governance

Organizations in heavily regulated sectors such as banking, finance, healthcare, insurance, and other regulatory sectors need a powerful solution like a hybrid cloud to manage security compliance. But for some time, these organizations were so unconfident about cloud computing that they either ban it or leverage it only for nonsensitive or noncritical data and tasks. 

Now organizations in every industry are using cloud technology at some level. Hybrid cloud is becoming more of a necessity for many businesses than just an option when it comes to a cost-effective solution for their business. It offers them a competitive edge to stand ahead of their competitors. That said, IT giants in compliance-heavy and security-focused verticals also face the difficulty in understanding how their security compliance and governance problems can be addressed by hybrid cloud. 

There is not only one regulation that imposes the challenge but the biggest challenge is due to the fact that still, many companies are doing manual checks for finding whether they are compliant with the security regulatory baselines for meeting the requirements of compliance and auditing. 

It is an error-prone, complex, and tedious process to start with, and it gets even more so while you have to deal with a variety of heterogeneous systems on-premises and the cloud. While doing the configuration changes manually, it happens many times that those changes don’t get detected, making the processes not repeatable, reproducible, and shareable which are a must for clearing security audits.

For example, managing security and governance is almost impossible in a hybrid cloud environment that constantly keeps on evolving. There, the chances of errors are extremely high and it’s also not possible to track the changes or replicate the processes. Also, due to this meeting, the security regulatory parameters for security auditing get even harder. 

How Anthos solves the problem:

With the help of Anthos, the entire process of scanning as well as remediation of security controls can be automated by using their open-source tools. Its goal is to offer crystal-clear visibility along with repeatability for saving you from the struggle of staying compliant across microservices, individual systems, containers, and the complete hybrid cloud infrastructure. 

2. Visibility and Control

The main challenge that a hybrid cloud environment faces due to a various Kubernetes cluster is the lack of clear visibility and control. After all, it’s not possible to control and secure the distributed system without seeing the entire environment. 

It holds true if you monitor the security and compliance manually. As there are more changes in the environment, the more difficult it gets to quickly and clearly:

• See the things that are happening within and across the environment
• Get control over the environment
• Secure and safeguard the cloud environment on a distributed level at the core of your infrastructure 

No matter whether it is across or on-premise cloud environments, it is a continuous risk to monitor the security and compliance manually. 

It is common to make changes in the configuration if you are working to keep up with all the things, right from changing the needs of DevOps to cloud application ops. There must be a high degree of automation in management tools that can implement not only infrastructure as code but also security as code. 

How Anthos solves the problem:

Google Anthos solves this problem through automation. It’s important for companies to automate everything to secure and reap maximum benefits from the hybrid cloud. Anthos offers you the level of automation that you need for efficient management of the configuration of your multiple Kubernetes cluster. Automation offers repeatability as well as the ability to verify and share, all of this will make it easier to clear the security audits. The challenges faced by configuration management are reduced through clear visibility and better control. 

3. Data Security Management

The health of your enterprise hybrid cloud infrastructure can break down as it changes, evolves, and grows. The protocols of cloud security must embrace the potential of public as well as private clouds – both on-premise and off-premise. Also, they must work for both resting data and in-transit data that require comprehensive data security management. This is because you will need to have authorization procedures, identity management, and authentication in place for both the locations.

How Anthos solves the problem:

Anthos works as a platform for both services and resources configuration in one place. It includes everything ranging from cloud storage to access and identity management. This makes the latter aspects of management possible via a single central location for configuration of resources through Kubernetes add-on which is also called Config Connector. 

This is just the beginning of discovering the various potential that Anthos holds to solve the huge number of challenges that enterprises may face while using hybrid cloud security. For now, we can say that Anthos can help you to eliminate the errors that occur in manual processes while you have a siloed environment to implement the security policies. 

Anthos provides a holistic method for governing your entire cloud infrastructure. It’s the commencement of finding how Anthos are solving the problems of cloud by offering security, flexibility, adaptability, and consistency across different types of environments. Certainly, there is risk involved in running, hosting, and managing loads of work in a hybrid cloud environment, and CloudMatos is ready to implement your hybrid cloud solution and help organizations to rise above the challenges.