What Is Hybrid Cloud?

A hybrid cloud combines elements of a public cloud, private cloud and on-premises infrastructure into a single, common, unified architecture allowing data and applications to be shared between the mixed IT environment. In a hybrid cloud environment, organizations have the option to run and scale workloads in the optimal setting, as well as the flexibility to move workloads between different environments quickly and easily.

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Components

Every hybrid cloud environment contains the following three components:

1. Public cloud services: delivered and supported via the public internet through a third-party cloud provider. Public cloud access is provided through a subscription model, such as platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or software-as-a-service (SaaS)

2. Private cloud services: which serve the same purpose as public clouds but are dedicated to just one customer. They provide a cloud infrastructure for exclusive use by one business, organization or government entity. Because the private cloud is not shared with any other users, this type of network tends to provide far greater control, privacy and security — as long as the user has adopted a comprehensive security strategy specifically designed for the cloud.

3. On-premises infrastructure: or a traditional computing environment, wherein select services are run, managed and maintained using hardware and servers owned and operated by the organization.

What Is Hybrid Cloud Security?

Hybrid cloud security is the collection of tools and processes designed for the protection of data and infrastructure that combines elements of private cloud, public cloud, and on-premises infrastructure into a unified architecture. A hybrid cloud is the IT environment combining these elements. The hybrid cloud offers high flexibility in moving workloads to different environments quickly while taking advantage of better features provided in those environments.

There are strong motivations to use a hybrid cloud architecture, but it also comes with additional security challenges that will be discussed in this article. Let’s start with the use cases for a hybrid cloud.

Hybrid Cloud Security Challenges

When applications are distributed over multiple clouds, they need to connect to each other and transmit data. This means, the traffic between clouds should be secure and encrypted. Creating an end-to-end secure connection between multiple cloud infrastructures becomes challenging, primarily when the networking models differ.

When multiple cloud infrastructures are connected, real-time threat detection systems could raise false alarms by wrongly identifying the traffic between cloud(s) and/or on-premises as malicious, or at least out of the ordinary. When the overall infrastructure becomes more complex, monitoring and alerting systems should be configured in great depth to catch real security breaches.

3 Components of Hybrid Cloud Security

There are three essential components to create a unified infrastructure that will work in harmony: physical, technical, and administrative controls.

1. Physical Controls Your organization might have a service level agreement (SLA) with your public cloud provider. It’s essentially an agreement outlining physical security standards that need to be met. This helps in preventing certain employees that do not have permission from accessing physical hardware, which can be detrimental if it reaches the wrong hands.

2. Technical Controls The connection between multiple cloud infrastructures makes them a hybrid cloud setup. Direct network connections between on-premises and clouds or VPN tunnels are the most common solutions and are mostly used together where the direct connection is the primary method and the VPN is a standby.

Encryption lets you encode data so only authorized parties are allowed to access it. When there are different infrastructures and cloud services connecting to each other, it’s easy to use an external solution—which can also be offered by one of the cloud providers in your hybrid cloud landscape—for secure and encrypted communication.

A hybrid cloud creates an environment where applications can consume services from other cloud providers. For instance, let’s assume the workload on cloud A (or on-premises) needs to be authenticated to cloud B, which is done through a set of credentials.

You must manage those credentials carefully, especially in terms of how they are distributed. Because leaking such credentials could have potentially devastating consequences. You also have to rotate them on a regular basis. Therefore, there’s a solid need for hybrid cloud security architecture to connect applications living on different infrastructure.

Cloud discovery and visibility are required to manage, configure, and monitor these components in a distributed infrastructure. Falcon-Core Cloud Security focuses on cloud security posture management (CSPM) to detect misconfigurations and potential threats while ensuring compliance across multiple cloud providers

3. Administrative Controls An essential part of keeping the hybrid cloud working is having a disaster preparedness plan ready to kick in when necessary. The plan should outline key roles and responsibilities so that every stakeholder knows what to do in an event of a disaster. It should also outline key protocols these stakeholders have to follow to ensure full data recovery.

Finally, a disaster preparedness plan should also account for human error. Because the hybrid cloud is extremely interconnected across environments, security should become a focus for every user of the cloud.

Why Falcon-Core Hybrid Cloud Security Solutions ?

• World-class intelligence: All cloud data is enriched with integrated threat intelligence to provide a full picture of attacks and the context needed to pivot to a proactive security posture.
• 24/7 threat hunting: Falcon-Core proactively searches for threats on our customers behalf. An elite team of threat hunters works 24/7 as an additional layer of protection to catch what other solutions miss.
• Fully managed service: Gain instant security maturity with a cost-effective way to address the cybersecurity skills gap. Our Experts will configure and operate the solution while also offering the industry's only true remote remediation service.
• Better protection: Get protection across the entire threat lifecycle by combining machine learning, artificial intelligence, behavioral analytics and proactive threat hunting in a single solution - all powered by Threat Graph, the security industry's largest cloud analytics platform.
• Better performance: A single lightweight agent works everywhere, including virtual machines and data centers - providing protection even when endpoints are offline.
• Better value: Get better protection while eliminating on-premise infrastructure and consolidating your endpoint agents with an extensible platform that grows and adapts to your needs without adding complexity.
• More than a decade of Experience and Growing: Uniquely trained Falcon-Core team are highly skilled and vastly experienced to combat any threat.

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