How to Deal with Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Management

Cloud computing is in full swing and many companies are switching from a single-cloud situation to a hybrid or multi-cloud environment. As enterprise storage and data protection has moved into the cloud, organizations find they must change the way they provision, manage, and maintain servers and rethink how they protect their data.

Managing these mixed environments requires careful planning for configuring the right controls to secure your data while eliminating one of the most expensive problems with maintaining compliance regulations: downtime. Here is how to deal with hybrid and multi-cloud management.

1. Know Your Cloud Provider

The first thing you need to know is your cloud provider and how they organize the hybrid cloud they are providing. You are bound to get different answers, but hybrid cloud management’s general goal is to find a balance between data access and security.

2. Arbitrate Data and Application Security

Data access and security rules in the hybrid environment you must build on the same principles as those in a single cloud environment. The idea is to define a clear plan that balances data access requirements for business applications against real-time protection for data.

3. Define Policy Settings

Knowledge gained from the previous steps will go into defining the security controls you will use to secure your data and applications in each cloud provider from one another. Defining the policy settings is a key step. Knowing where your data and applications their location will help you make decisions on what controls to allocate to each location.

4. Provision Your Environment

Once the policy settings are defined, you can begin provisioning your environment using a central management tool. It is important to understand that production workloads should be separated from development environments and treated accordingly.

5. Set Monitoring Controls

Having a clear idea of where your servers and applications are in a location in the multi-cloud environment will help you set the right level of monitoring for each. For example, you may need to closely monitor virtual machines for access control violations or suspicious activities, whereas file system access may require less frequent monitoring.

6. Maintain Security and Availability

While the hybrid environment makes it easier to do so, it is still important to maintain security and availability for your data and applications. Your data must be in protection from, among others, natural disasters, human error, insider attacks and even malicious attacks from hackers. Having backup systems in place to restore files on demand is a must.

7. Keep Up with Policy Changes

Defining your policy settings will also help you keep up with changes in regulations as laws on data security and privacy continue to evolve.

8. Stay On Top of Security Updates

Security updates on both the cloud provider side and your equipment will be in need to keep your data protected like enterprise vault migration to Office 365. It is also important to know what vulnerabilities exist and which ones are in fixation to update as soon as possible.

9. Use The Right Tools

Managing the multiple control layers you must do using the right tools. You can, of course, use the cloud provider’s tools to access and manage your data but you will still need your toolkit so that you can perform tasks such as policy auditing, application security assessment, and security management.

10. Merge The Clouds

Another step is to merge your hybrid cloud with the cloud that meets all your requirements. It is where reverse billing comes in. Your data will no longer be a cloud object but rather a set of resources accessed and controlled from different locations. This approach, however, does not address the fact that you may still need to manage your multiple clouds centrally.

11. Keep an Eye On Compliance

Finally, it is important to watch compliance regulations. A hybrid cloud environment will allow you to access more of your data but it does not mean losing sight of what is going on. It would help if you still were keeping up with the latest changes in regulations.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this article has given you an insight into hybrid and multi-cloud management. The key is to understand that it is about having a clear plan that balances data access requirements for business applications against real-time protection for data.

These are the same challenges organizational storage management teams face today when trying to provide centralized management of all their underlying storage systems rather than managing individual silos of storage.