As expert IT consultants, we understand that addressing the risks within your cloud infrastructure requires the right action plan.
A growing number of organizations are moving critical applications and processes to the cloud, be it public cloud infrastructure or on-premises.
The cloud appeals to businesses for many reasons, particularly in that it provides an environment that is more dynamic, flexible, accessible, and cost-effective than relying solely on traditional in-house data storage.
With the explosion in digital innovation in recent years, the ways in which the cloud is used have also massively expanded. Yet with more complexity comes additional risk—from cyber attacks, to costly outages and downtime, to other failures or missteps.
Interruptions and failures within the cloud can cost teams time and productivity, profitability, and reputation. Yet the cloud is an evolving technology that requires a proactive approach to assessing and minimizing risks.
Companies must first take inventory of how and where they store data, who has access, and what the potential risks are, depending on the type of data and the specific security environment. Identifying risk means assessing the security of all networks and applications.
Some potential risks to assess within the cloud include:
· Cloud service outage
· Data theft and other cyber crimes
· Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks
· Single Point of Failure (SPoF) events
· Legal noncompliance
Data governance also plays a critical role in being proactive about identifying and mitigating future risks. Putting a data governance system in place to store and organize data that is regularly tested reduces the risk of data mismanagement and potential compromises.
Zero trust security comes down to isolating data and tailoring levels of network access based on who needs access to specific applications within the network at a given time. Levels of access and authentication should be tightly monitored and maintained over time, basing access and privileges on the context of individual job functions.
It’s critical to regularly assess levels of access and monitor and record all traffic in the cloud, adjusting when needed. Team members working on a specific application to accomplish a specific business goal may not need broad, administrative access within the cloud.
With consistent authentication and accessibility control for each new action within the cloud, you limit the potential risks associated with high levels of traffic and unmanaged access. Implementing zero trust security within the cloud will also offer you insights about your data and how to build new data security measures over time.
Once you have assessed your cloud storage and security strategies, automated security scans can help you spend less time on repetitive security tasks. The need for constant manual monitoring takes time and resources from other important tasks that help an organization grow.
Teams can automate infrastructure buildouts, scripts, deployments, and security scanning to help reduce the manual burden and build consistency into the security process.
The data collected can then be used to further enhance the automation of security workflows to optimize the process, whether you’re using a single cloud environment, multi-cloud, or a hybrid strategy.
Building automation into your cloud security IT strategy helps reduce manual mistakes, increase consistency and productivity, add agility to the process of identifying and eliminating risks, and helps in maintaining legal and regulatory compliance.
Loss of availability can be caused by any number of issues. A cyber attack creates an outage for your cloud service provider. On-premises server hardware fails. An untested update causes a software application to become faulty.
Redundancy is the key to ensuring a high level of availability and reducing the risk of downtime caused by a single point of failure (SPoF) or DDoS attack.
For instance, if standby nodes are located on the same server with the same network switch as your primary operating node, a failure in one of these elements could cause a SPoF failure that takes down the entire system. While creating redundancy in your physical IT infrastructure can help prevent these types of failures, the public cloud presents the potential for outages as well, and these outages are not necessarily preventable from your company’s end.
As an example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is used by many highly profitable and well known brands; an error in 2017 is estimated to have created a four-hour long outage that cost some S&P 500 companies $150 million and U.S. financial services companies $160 million in losses.
A hybrid cloud approach involves using both the public cloud environment and a private cloud to store data, applications, and assets, and can be used in a variety of ways for a dynamic approach to building your DevOps culture and creating agile workflows.
Hybrid cloud strategies also allow you to minimize the risk of SPOF and DDoS failures by letting you create redundancy between cloud environments. You can do this by creating backups and archives, as well as standby systems across the infrastructure.
This approach allows you to stay available while you work on recovering the affected systems.
Scaling in the cloud while minimizing potential risks is a complex process. It takes knowledge and planning from technology leaders with the experience to help C-level executives bring their business goals to fruition in the digital age.
Leadership-minded IT consultants you can trust continue to prove invaluable to businesses who must evolve in how they leverage their technology, while also protecting against potential threats or failures within their digital infrastructures.
At Vudu, our team will work with your business’s leadership to achieve the perfect marriage of technology and business strategies. We have the business acumen, technical expertise, and operational excellence that many IT partners simply lack.
Nobody is better than Vudu at turning data into insights, insights into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. When managed correctly, data can allow you to make better decisions exponentially faster, revolutionize your workflow, and drastically lower the price of your work product
At Vudu, we are technology wizards who want to bring IT magic to your business and achieve supernatural results. Is your organization working to build a cloud infrastructure the right way? Tell us more about your goals.
