Compliance and Security Make Beautiful Bedfellows

For an increasing number of organizations, hybrid clouds represent an ideal approach to capitalizing on the scalability of the public cloud and the reality of on-premise hardware. Blending these tools into a cohesive environment can seem daunting, but the right partner can help you craft an ecosystem that is a thing of beauty addressing IT execs’ top priorities: security AND compliance.

According to the 2019 Rightscale® State of the Cloud report, 81 percent of enterprise respondents named security a top concern and 79 percent named compliance as a top cloud challenge. For highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services that also manage a staggering number of constituents’ personal information, having one without the other is not an option. Security and compliance must be a package deal.

Today, the best hybrid cloud solutions – a blend of on-premises, private cloud infrastructure with third-party, public cloud services that work together to perform a single task – easily allow companies to securely, compliantly maintain their data. In fact, compliance now comes standard from public cloud providers, some of whom can boast 100 percent successful audits on standards like SOC 1/2/3, ISO 27001, PCI, HIPAA, HITRUST and more. How companies choose to structure their hybrid solution will depend on their unique needs, responsibilities and line of work. And, a lot of it comes down to workload.

Not all workloads are created equal. Some are better placed in a public cloud, such as application development, business services or applications that require bursts of compute and/or storage power. Others that require more security and low latency, such as real-time trading deal applications or patient health records, are more suited to a private or virtual private cloud. A hybrid cloud is attractive because the workloads they are running from multiple providers are more efficient, secure and compliant. For example, a healthcare application may host its data on premise for security and compliance reasons but run testing and development workloads on a public cloud because they only need to be spun up temporarily.

To ensure your hybrid cloud solution is best built to marry security and compliance, consider the following recommendations:

• Get encrypted. Encryption is widely considered a best practice for your data. Network endpoints are some of the most vulnerable spots for an attack, so you’ll want encryption between your devices.
• Demand solid SLAs. Pay attention to how the SLA aligns with your customer demands and have a plan to reconcile any differences. One way to do this is to create a workloads matrix for your mission-critical, business-critical and business-important systems and determine how much availability they require.
• Make it redundant. Implement a robust backup and disaster recovery plan that can connect to the cloud for simple and easy recovery. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Backup as a Service (BaaS) are two different ways you can address potential downtime and data loss effectively, no matter what cloud environment you have.

Hybrid cloud is the ultimate destination for many businesses. The unique ability to place your workloads where they run best can help give you the security and compliance you won’t compromise while capitalizing on the efficiency and cost effectiveness of any cloud model on the market today.

If you’re ready to make the move to hybrid cloud, or want to review your strategy with cloud experts before you begin your migration, we’re happy to help. Contact us at www.otava.com/contact or call (877) 740-5028.