In a year, 80% of all IT budgets will be committed to cloud solutions.
With the need to reduce IT costs while increasing flexibility and scalability, this shouldn’t come as a shock.
The rise of hybrid clouds has served to increase this adoption. Organizations can now benefit from the control and security of a private cloud hosted on their own network and enjoy the cost management and extended services that come with public clouds offered by third-parties.
However, while expanding into the cloud has become increasingly more beneficial and necessary for SMBs, it has also become more challenging.
Here are 9 factors to consider when evaluating hybrid public and private cloud solutions:
- Scalability: Understand how your business will grow and choose a cloud infrastructure that will be elastic enough to scale with your business without slowing it down or reducing security.
- Integration: Choose private and public solutions that will work together as a single network.
- Openness and Extensibility: Select an open and extendable cloud solution that allows you to build on it and incorporate new features and applications.
- Visibility and Control: Make sure the solution you choose does not result in diminished visibility. According to a recent survey by ESG Research, 62% of cybersecurity professionals struggle with getting the same level of visibility into cloud-based workloads as they have on their physical networks.
- Segmentation: Consider if and how you can segment your network while taking advantage of integration. Using both physical and virtual firewalls can ensure that a breach in one segment of your cloud infrastructure will not lead to network-wide access and a larger loss of data.
- Breadth: Evaluate solutions that can protect data traveling through your public and private clouds while also providing border control. Maintaining the security of hybrid cloud infrastructure that is both highly integrated and segmented requires a broad security approach. Intelligence –Integrate your cloud security into SIEM and other analytics to give you accurate insight into both your public and private clouds.
- Awareness: In addition to security intelligence, make sure your infrastructure allows you to track how data flows in, out of, and around your network and identify who has access to it.
- Adaptability: Pick a cloud solution that can keep up with security and computing innovations and ensure that your infrastructure is adaptable enough to update without requiring a major overhaul.
- Automation: Take advantage of automation so that your infrastructure can learn and improve upon itself without the need for constant human intervention. A full 56% of cybersecurity professionals say their organization’s current network security operations and processes lack the right level of automation needed for the cloud.
Working with a VAR, such as Xiologix, can help you expand safely into the cloud. Xiologix can help determine the right cloud infrastructure for you, see that it is deployed correctly ensuring the advantages of a hybrid cloud solution that meet all of the requirements above.
