EDITOR’S QUESTION
Rolf Haas
Enterprise Tech Specialist,
Intel Security
While the popularity of cloud grows, it’s clear
to anyone in the industry that organisations
are not simply moving all their applications
and data into the public cloud. The reality
is more complex and is a hybrid of public
and private cloud (and existing in-house
infrastructure and systems).
The rate of adoption of hybrid cloud varies
widely depending on whose statistics you
choose to believe. One study by IDG Research
claims 83% of CIOs currently use hybrid cloud
or plan to do so in the future. Analyst Gartner,
however, estimates between 10-15% of
enterprises have adopted a hybrid strategy.
Gartner also predicts hybrid cloud will hit
mainstream adoption within the next two to
five years.
The benefits of hybrid cloud are clear for
enterprises. It gives organisations the
flexibility to use on-premise (or outsourced
or off-premise but fully-owned) private cloud
where appropriate or switch workloads into
the public cloud and scale according to
demand (or do both at the same time). Cloud
provisioning can be done at the click of a
mouse and investment only needs to commit
to weekly or monthly rental.
As ever, the big issue for this new era of
hybrid cloud is security. A survey by analyst
451 Research reveals that 59% of senior IT
executives believe maintaining consistent
access security and authorization controls
across a hybrid environment is a significant
challenge.
At a more strategic level many of the concerns
among organisations relate to the privacy
issues around putting company data in the
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public cloud. These fears centre on who might
have the authority to access the company
data hosted by the public cloud provider.
Clearly this is an issue that has to be
overcome if organisations are able to reap
the full flexibility and cost benefits of a hybrid
cloud environment that allows them to push
applications and data into the public cloud in
line with business needs.
That is where hybrid security comes in.
The key to this is for companies to be able
to seamlessly push and enforce their own
security policies from on-premise proxy
infrastructure to a public infrastructure. For the
enterprise this provides the ability, if required,
to encrypt corporate data that sits in a public
cloud service and offers complete protection
for every endpoint.
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