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EDITOR’S QUESTION
SCOTT GORDON, (CISSP)
CMO, PULSE SECURE
D
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Data centres must up security to ride
the hybrid wave
In Q318, for the first time, quarterly vendor
revenues from IT infrastructure product sales
into cloud environments surpassed revenues
from sales into traditional IT environments.
According to IDC, 50.9% of the total
worldwide IT infrastructure vendor revenues
were derived from cloud.
Even with the popularity of private, public
and hybrid cloud, the benefits of having
dedicated data centre capacity is still critical
to an overwhelming number of enterprises.
Performance, data sovereignty, resiliency and
exacting regulatory requirements all feed
into a need to maintain racks in strategically
important data centres.
At least for the short term, even those with
cloud-first business models are not necessarily
cloud exclusive. The current position for many
organisations is a hybrid mode which mixes
on-premise, which could be considered as
their own data centres or co-lo, with public/
private cloud and often SaaS.
This diverse model can often offer the best
of all worlds by accommodating different
business stakeholders from agile developers to
the keepers of highly tuned legacy applications
that don’t play nicely in a public cloud.
Other elements such as security are also
evolving to serve this hybrid IT position.
One of the most critical changes is the
emergence of a zero trust security model.
In simple terms, zero trust does away with
the assumption that all access from within
the corporate network is trusted and instead
verifies everything.
This shift makes multi-cloud access
management critical and modern enterprises
are deploying secure access technologies
www.intelligentcio.com
such as single sign on (SSO) and software
defined perimeter (SDP) to simplify the
process. SDP aids this by separating the
control plane of user authentication and
access with the data plane connecting users
and applications.
Although not a new concept, it has only
been within the last few years that it has
started to rise in popularity with analyst firms
predicting strong 35% CACG over the next
five years – in part fuelled by the needs of
hybrid IT.
Integrating security controls that span
on-premise and cloud is also a major trend.
This has led to deeper support for open
standards for exchanging authentication
and authorisation data between parties.
Standards such as Security Assertion Mark-
up Language (SAML) and OAuth (Open
Authorisation) have gained more traction
over the last few years and will become
increasingly critical for delivering a zero
trust future.
Data centres and cloud providers need to be
aware of this shift and be able to support
this switch towards zero trust to remain a
valuable part of a hybrid IT ecosystem that
looks to be with us for the foreseeable future.
INTELLIGENTCIO
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