Hybrid cloud services are becoming increasingly popular among enterprise-level businesses, and with them come security concerns unique to the hybrid cloud infrastructure.

According to a study by Avanade, 75% of C-suite executives believe that hybrid cloud integration should be the main area of focus for their company in 2017. At the same time, cloud security spending is expected to grow from $24 billion in 2016 to $26.4 billion in 2017.

This growth is sure to attract the attention of the global cybercrime industry, which is experiencing a surge in growth year-by-year. In 2015, there was an average of 1,000 ransomware attacks per day, and in 2016 the rate had ballooned to 4,000 attacks per day, according to a joint report by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Secret Service. The WannaCry Ransonware attack of 2017 affected over 200,000 victims, and a security hole in a public cloud service exposed voter information of over 200M Americans. In 2017 and beyond, enterprise-level businesses and institutions should expect massive cybercrime growth.

Cybersecurity for the Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud technology offers enormous benefits to enterprises and large organizations. However, keeping hybrid cloud data secure presents unique challenges. Hybrid cloud service providers and clients need to work together to form reliable and secure strategies for data protection.

The main security goal for the hybrid cloud is configuring and maintaining a uniform policy across the entire cloud network – easier said than done, in most cases. To begin building a robust cybersecurity policy, enterprises must clearly define the following processes in a cloud processing-friendly way:

• Infrastructure Policy: A hybrid cloud infrastructure policy needs to carefully delineate what processes and services occur on the private cloud and which ones occur on the public cloud. Geographically-relevant colocation processes need to be outlined as well. Without this policy, cloud management quickly degrades into a data free-for-all that is difficult, if not impossible, to secure.
• Firewall Rules: Firewall rules become more complex as internal and external network connections are added to hybrid cloud infrastructure. Web application firewalls need to be customized for each environment in the cloud and narrowly focused for each. Incoming traffic needs to be forced through the firewall in environments where multiple subnets may allow firewalls to be bypassed.
• IPS Signatures: Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) signatures need to be constantly updated cloud-wide. New threats appear on a disturbingly regular basis, and signature-based inspection is one of the most effective cybersecurity methods currently available.
• User Authentication: User authentication remains one of the most common points of exploitation used by cybercriminals. Two-step authenticatio

Hybrid cloud solutions offer key benefits to enterprises – combining the best services of multiple providers allows each individual aspect of your business to run at optimal efficiency. However, keeping track of decentralized data and integrating existing private cloud systems with a hybrid cloud provider can be challenging.

The key to ensuring the best possible result from hybrid cloud integration is by establishing a uniform policy that serves as a foundation for communication among disparate business units that may be running on separate infrastructure platforms.

There are a few situations that hybrid clouds are uniquely suited to address. For instance, if your company wishes to use a Software-as-a-Service application but is concerned about security, the SaaS vendor can create a private cloud, inside their firewall, specifically for your company. If the company provides you with a virtual private network to access the software, you're essentially using a small-scale hybrid cloud.

The key element there is that there is a private cloud working alongside a public cloud – this is the defining characteristic of hybrid clouds. Enterprises get a flexible, cost-effective mix of public and private cloud services.

Elements of the Combined Private/Public Cloud

The purpose of the hybrid cloud is giving enterprises the ability to move workloads from the private cloud to the public cloud when needed. This may be desirable for any number of reasons – outage or peak demand for computing resources in the private cloud, for instance.

When this happens, the hybrid cloud infrastructure allows for additional computing resources to be called upon on an as-needed basis, but achieving that level of integration requires considering a number of factors:

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