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Different Aspects of a Multi-Cloud Environment

Faisal Yahya, Head Of IT, PT IBS Insurance Broking Service

Faisal Yahya, Head Of IT, PT IBS Insurance Broking Service

It is a high priority for any sized business, to accelerate their innovation and mitigate time-to-market to meet their customer needs and fend off the competition. These organizations are seeking to leverage cloud technology where the most prominent advantage of the cloud computing environment is the expenditure and scalability. This solution is highly cost-effective and can have a strategic position. Rather than spending high prices for various hardware and software, business will acquire all your processing power and storage in one place making use of a mixture of platforms, which are safe and secure. Moreover, they are provisioned and scalable, leading to elastic computing. However, current on-premise investments and many proprietary applications have hindered the cloud migration. Business moves gradually to adopt two computing models to complement and balance with their existing investment, which is Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud.

The hybrid cloud has become a favorite solution and tool for thousands of companies that require different cloud solutions for various tasks. This type of cloud solution makes use of both public and private cloud for one organization. The public cloud is used for less valuable or security-demanding projects, while the private cloud for processing sensitive data or other projects, such as customer information and payment information. For any cloud- aspiring or already cloud-intensive enterprise, a hybrid cloud strategy comes down to finding the right collection of cloud technologies and orchestration tools that make the organization faster and more efficient.

According to recent research, 61 percent of enterprises now use two or more public clouds, and 35 percent use four or more public clouds. Not every cloud service provider can perfectly match their best capabilities with business needs, leaving spaces for enterprises to use more than one cloud environment from different providers, coined as multi-cloud.

The Challenges

Hybrid cloud is beyond mere technology practice – it’s more about positioning your business in the competition. Hybrid cloud leverages business advantages that will keep enterprises ahead. The adoption unquestionably supports enterprises as they balance purchases with the need to expand and accelerate, but many businesses encounter difficulties as they race ahead to adopt a hybrid cloud. Unless enterprises address their underlying data infrastructures, many companies end up with different private and public cloud services.

This disparity can result in issues with:

• Disparate Silos: Critical or sensitive data ends up siloed in several locations or cloud regions. It becomes a necessity for companies to design a strategy to connect these separate groups to gain the maximum benefit of Hybrid Cloud

Cloud computing potentially opens the door to a wealth of business advantages that will keep enterprises advancing of their competition

• Regulatory Compliance: Critical or sensitive data must be stored in a secure, local or on-premise data centers. The companies must continuously manage data autonomy to meet data sovereignty and compliance requirements

The Security Concern

In the last couple of years, many CIOs and CISOs have raised their two top concerns for businesses regardless of their size, which is security and data protection. Also, in the last five years, the number of data breaches is on the rise, urging companies to prioritize protection to their customers’ data as well as their own, including keeping up with various regulations (i.e., GDPR). A business may have security without compliance, but these companies will never achieve regulatory compliance without adopting security. Meeting regulatory compliance requires an evolution of security strategies continuously and building more layers to their present architecture. These are the three key concerns when improving the security architecture:

• The threat surface is distributed and expanded as the corporate system is now running the workload on a different environment

• Deferring some risk to your cloud service providers doesn’t mean you have done anything to address that risk. It is fundamental to maintain omission of how sensitive data protected in different cloud workload environments

• Increasing hybrid cloud adoption, along with related trends such as containers and microservices, urge CIOs and CISOs to realize the need for unique security approaches in the era of continuous delivery and increasingly distributed environments and architectures

The Benefit

• Expedited innovation: Public cloud technology allows businesses to test out new techniques or resources as required. When the changes thoroughly test, the hybrid cloud or multi-cloud technology will enable enterprises to transfer these innovations then back to secure, on-premise storage

• Businesses can expand the cloud capacity if needed quickly. This elasticity is expressly useful for online retailers during the holiday or high season, who may only need to grow for a short-limited period

• Businesses get the flexibility to retain required data in a specific geographical region to meet privacy and regulatory compliance while having the portability to freely move other data between clouds that exist in different geographies

• Distributed cloud data processing: This style of data processing can leverage any cloud infrastructure in a single database, so the application seamlessly spans both private and one or more public clouds

• Always-on architecture: Distributed database technology is typically built on a peer-to-peer design, meaning that the database system rarely falters, even if specific cloud issues arise

• Scalability: Distributed database technology can instantly scale the size in any of its clouds, regardless of workload requirements

• Security control: This hybrid cloud technology can quickly discern between various levels of the cloud environment to maintain designated security measures

• Workloads: A retailer can rapidly expand web and application servers during the holiday season to the public cloud without needing to acquire new hardware and then scale back with ease.

While there is unusually a “one size fits all” answer when it comes to IT Enterprise designs, cloud computing environment typically offers increased flexibility, portability, and scalability. Cloud computing potentially opens the door to a wealth of business advantages that will keep enterprises advancing of their competition.