One of the first concepts that every student of economics learns about is trade-offs – if an IT department allocates more of its budget to cybersecurity, it may have less to spend on software development or hardware upgrades.
A decade ago, enterprise CIOs were weighing the economic and operational trade-offs of migrating certain resources and workloads to the cloud. Ultimately, a significant number of them decided that the agility and cost-savings provided by public cloud services made the trade-off worthwhile, as it would provide them with greater operational flexibility without having to crank up their capital expenditures.
Ten years on, the calculus of the cloud decision has shifted. Despite the rapid growth and broad adoption of the public cloud, many enterprise CIOs are beginning to reconsider their public cloud strategy. It turns out that the variable cost structure of the cloud was, in many cases, wildly unpredictable depending on several key factors, such as data transfer volumes, the demand for computing power and the scaling requirements of applications.
This unpredictability, coupled with hidden costs like data egress fees and premium services, has led some organizations to experience unexpectedly high expenses, challenging the initial notion of cloud computing as a cost-effective solution. The popular collaboration platform, Basecamp, is one such example of an organization fed up with being gouged by the cloud, estimating that they expect to save more than $7 million dollars over the next five years by repatriating some of their cloud workloads.
Beyond issues of cost, CIOs and their CISO counterparts are also growing anxious about the security of their workloads and data in the public cloud. While public cloud providers offer robust security measures, they operate under a shared responsibility model in which the cloud provider is accountable for the security of the cloud itself, but customers are responsible for securing their data within the cloud.
So the question now becomes: how should you manage your infrastructure in the most cost and operationally efficient manner possible while ensuring that you can still assert the necessary security control over sensitive workloads and data?
Hybrid Cloud, the Best of Both Worlds?
Hybrid cloud, which combines public cloud with on-premises data centers, enables businesses to keep some critical workloads in their private infrastructure for security, compliance or cost reasons, while taking advantage of the cloud’s scalability and speed of innovation for other workloads. While it sounds like a ‘best of both worlds’ scenario, that doesn’t mean there aren’t trade-offs that need to be considered.
One of the primary concerns in a hybrid environment is ensuring the security and privacy of data, both while it’s in transit and at rest. As data moves between the cloud and on-premises data centers, safeguarding it across various locations raises new and complex governance and compliance issues.
For instance, different data storage and processing locations are often subject to varying regulatory frameworks and compliance requirements, making it challenging to maintain a consistent and compliant data management strategy. This makes it all the more important to implement robust encryption protocols and uniform security policies across all platforms to mitigate risks associated with data breaches and unauthorized access.
Hybrid cloud environments can also further complicate identity and access management systems. Managing permissions and ensuring that only authorized individuals have access to data and applications across different environments is imperative and will often require advanced identity management solutions that can operate seamlessly across separate platforms.
Of course, as data moves and gets replicated between various cloud and on-prem environments, the more difficult it becomes to maintain visibility and control over all of the assets and workloads. Likewise, the more distributed the workloads and data become, the greater the potential attack surface grows, laying yet another burden on time-strapped IT security teams.
Three Trade-off Considerations
As an independent software vendor with limited financial resources at our disposal, we’ve struggled with these trade-offs firsthand. While there’s a wide array of trade-offs to consider, we believe that understanding the following three key aspects are most crucial:
#1. Risk assessment: Before transitioning to a hybrid cloud model, conducting a thorough risk assessment and audit is crucial to align the strategy with the business's specific needs. This exercise should begin by identifying which applications or systems are most suitable for the cloud and which ones are best left on-premises, taking into account factors like data privacy regulations and network latency. For instance, applications dealing with sensitive data may need to stay on-premises to comply with stringent regulatory requirements, while less sensitive, scalable applications can be moved to the cloud. Furthermore, it's essential to have a clear understanding of how to assess risks associated with moving different resources, including their underlying components. Such an approach is key in terms of identifying and mitigating potential threats – especially when it comes to minimizing potential single points of failure.
#2. Centralized Identity across cloud and data center: Within hybrid cloud, identity and access management (IAM) represents a critical security layer, one that often faces challenges in the transition to cloud environments. Ensuring robust security in hybrid cloud necessitates the implementation of comprehensive federated IAM controls that span multi-cloud and on-premises environments. Because access controls for individual accounts can vary significantly between each owing to their distinct enforcement mechanisms, it's vital to have a nuanced understanding of the context and entitlements of each user type. This differentiation also helps to ensure that users only have the necessary permissions to perform their roles, thereby reducing the risk of unauthorized access or data breaches.
#3. Minimize dependence on cloud specific services: To maintain flexibility and adaptability, IT leaders must ensure that their workloads and applications are not so deeply entwined with a single cloud provider's environment that migration becomes impractical. This is especially crucial for organizations aiming to implement a multi-cloud strategy, as lack of portability can severely hamper their options. For instance, applications designed exclusively for one cloud platform may encounter compatibility and performance issues when moved to a different environment. Additionally, placing all your eggs in a single vendor's applications introduces a significant risk, which not only limits your ability to adapt to changing market conditions but also poses a substantial business continuity risk.
Above all, it’s important to remember that at the most basic level, the cloud is really just someone else’s data center. Regardless of where your workloads and data live you need to be responsible for it.
