July 2020 - Cloudlytics

How Cloud Computing Drives Remote Working

Posted on July 30, 2020July 27, 2021 by Varoon Rajani

For most organizations, enhanced productivity and employee satisfaction are desired outcomes to continue with their remote workforce, even in the post-COVID-19 world. However, it is necessary that organizations increasingly adopt cloud services to facilitate their remote workforce to access corporate resources as and when required.

Cloud services have increasingly helped many organizations to uphold their remote workforce, irrespective of their location worldwide. Also, the adoption of real-time communication platforms has been on an upward spiral, enabling non-siloed and seamless communications within an organization.

Remote Working and the Cloud

According to Gartner, over 90% of leaders in APAC have executed the work-from-home policy since the pandemic outbreak. The identification and the need for quick response to the immediate repercussions of the COVID-19 led a growing number of contingency plans. Almost everyone of these plans involved remote working as an absolute necessity.

Most businesses are usually under a tight budget while focusing on productivity enhancement. Cloud computing, gaining the centerstage, has significantly gained importance as a valuable asset for organizations to meet their objectives. Cloud hosting is growing increasingly persuasive to organizations, as they can leverage the benefits of cloud computing as well as their applications stack with the help of an effective remote workforce.

Ways in Which the Cloud Facilitates the Remote Workforce

It will not be an overstatement to say that cloud data is more secure than the data stored on-premises, with growing sophistication of cyberattacks. Here are some ways in which the cloud enables organizations to develop an effective remote workforce without compromising security or productivity.

Affordable Solution

The inherent cost effectiveness of cloud computing in the long run makes it a viable solution for businesses. Instead of replacing or upgrading the equipment, organizations see migrating to the cloud as a feasible way to save on upfront costs. This helps them in shifting IT budgets to operational expenditure. Also, the cloud enables the organizations to enable their remote workforce to access essential resources from any compatible device and location.

Reliable

The early adopters of cloud better understand the complexity associated with it. More importantly, they have the expertise and knowledge to overcome those complexities and modernize their infrastructure while saving costs. Established cloud service providers deliver a reliable, secure, and robust experience for the remote workforce. Also, the platforms that the CSPs offer are compliant to cloud security standards, which empowers the organizations to remain competitive.

The Cloud is the Way Forward for Organizations

Organizations that haven’t yet effectively established their remote workforce are in dire to identify their core business use cases. This will help them in implementing short-term solutions that will satisfy their immediate mission-critical objectives. While it is clear that not every organization will achieve 100% effectiveness in establishing their remote workforce, they can leverage cloud services for continued business. Organizations that have a thorough understanding of ways to implement, support, and guide their remote workforce are touted to maintain their competitive edge in the post-COVID-19 world.

Key Approaches to Secure A Multicloud Environment

Posted on July 30, 2020June 16, 2021 by Abhijeet Chinchole

The trend of multicloud has spiralled up in recent years. According to Gartner, the adoption of next-generation technologies are cloud-enhanced, meaning they almost always build on a cloud platform for delivering digital business capabilities. With next-generation solutions come more complicated security challenges. However, cloud adoption does not feature security-centric approaches.

Multicloud environments need different public cloud services, which makes it necessary for organizations to be advanced in their security measures. Growing complexities of multicloud environments are exponentially adding to organizations’ attack surface, thereby increasing the level of risk. Organizations can mitigate most of these challenges with a thorough assessment of security needs and coming up with a robust security strategy.

What Must Organizations Do for Securing Their Multicloud Environment?

A multicloud environment offers numerous benefits, including cost savings and efficiency. However, it comes with several security barriers. It is important that organizations understand the risks to benefit the most from their multicloud strategy. Following are some approaches that organizations can follow for securing their multicloud environment.

Vendor Dependency

Cloud service providers possess several security measures for protecting the infrastructure of organizations. However, organizations believe these security measures cover their applications and data. Security is a shared responsibility, wherein the responsibility of organizations is even more with PaaS or IaaS. It is imperative that organizations learn what areas of an infrastructure do cloud security providers protect, working with them to identify right security tools to safeguard their applications and data.

Compliance

It is mandatory for organizations to comply with industry standards, data regulations, and federal laws. In case of sensitive data stored in the public cloud, there is a high risk of compromising compliance. Organizations must store their sensitive data in servers that are in close proximity to their internal controls for remaining compliant. Also, the compliance efforts are required to be consistent throughout the multicloud environment of an organization.

Protecting Historical Data

Several cloud security tools tend to focus on real-time utilization of data. However, they do not usually focus on historical data that is stored in archives. As data privacy laws grow more stringent than ever, meeting new compliance rules for historical data is not properly labeled, which makes it more vulnerable to cyberattacks. Organizations must follow best security practices for their historical data, which include improved data classification to realize data-loss prevention with a robust action plan.

Vulnerability Management

There are many security vulnerabilities associated with software and applications. Organizations must resort to frequent testing for identifying and resolving the vulnerabilities. One of the primary ways of doing this is by using a threat intelligence software, wherein regularly scheduled software scans and penetration testing help organizations improve vulnerability management faster. Organizations must see vulnerability management as a feasible solution to prevent malicious feeds from gaining easy accessibility to their multicloud environment.

Looking Forward

Multicloud environments are changing rapidly and there is a growing need for a robust security framework among organizations. It is necessary for organizations to understand that securing multicloud environments is a complex task. Following an approach of security-by-design that encompasses security within the organization’s cloud migration strategy will enable them to leverage benefits of the cloud while mitigating risks.

What do you need to make your multi-cloud environment secure? Consult the cloud experts who have done it for many clients. Book an appointment here

Planning A Multicloud Strategy: Everything You Need to Know

Posted on July 23, 2020June 29, 2021 by Varoon Rajani

Cloud computing is touted by organizations worldwide as the base that drives transformation, differentiation, and competitive advantage. Currently, most organizations are focused on implementing cloud-first strategies for advancing the leverage of cloud services in their business. However. the use of a multicloud environment for analytics is inevitable.

Cloud first is not the same as cloud always. Long-term goals for some organizations is to remove all applications from their data centers, whereas for others, cloud-first means moving subsets of applications to the cloud. It is important for organizations to prioritize investments for advancing their consumption of cloud services.

Why Must Organizations Adopt Multicloud?

According to Gartner, multicloud adoption will surge as the percentage of large organizations connecting to cloud providers rises to 50% by 2023. Multicloud is indispensable for use cases where organizations procure cloud services and look to ensure that their offerings work on different cloud platforms. Most organizations are touted to partner with multiple cloud providers. Technology innovation leaders are focusing on selecting the right multicloud strategy, which best suits their business objectives.

Growing adoption of multicloud deployments in line with data management solutions has crucial implications for analytics strategies. It is necessary for analytics leaders that they prepare for these impacts to ensure an optimal consumption of cloud resources. As a small cohort of vendors dominate the public cloud, it poses barriers-to-entry for new competitors. Therefore, it is important for organizations to invest in multicloud for maximizing the cloud opportunity.

Key Steps to Multicloud Adoption

In order to develop a sound multicloud strategy, organizations need to understand technology implications and challenges associated with these while opting for the cloud deployment. Following are key steps that organizations can follow for planning a multicloud strategy.
The best possible way to resolve identity issues with multicloud is using a distributed architecture. Organizations can use orchestration software that serve as the connectivity media between on-premises and cloud identity systems.
As part of their migration projects, organizations must not move unorganized identity silos. They must rather upgrade and modernize their identity capabilities using identity-as-a-service.
For effective implementation of an identity strategy, organizations need to understand the location of their existing systems, their interdependencies, and access authorizations.
When updating their identity systems, organizations must avoid any lock-in to their proprietary systems and moving outdated APIs. This helps them eliminate the need to rewrite applications and seamlessly interoperate with the new identity system.
Organizations can simplify the complications associated with the migration process by breaking it into compact phases that are more manageable. Grouping migration phases and orchestrating an incremental shift helps organizations minimize any disruption or risk.

To Sum Up

It is important for technology leaders to prepare for an intercloud and multicloud world, where data integration, governance, and management are complex. Continuous evaluation of requirements can help organizations realize optimal options to extend and integrate SaaS solutions. Also, organizations will see better returns from their existing SaaS offering when they shift some integrations and applications to a multicloud environment.

Securing the Azure Storage Infrastructure

Posted on July 15, 2020June 16, 2021 by Pratyaksha Rawal

Organizations have been banking on Azure Storage infrastructure for sophisticated services that it offers. However, understanding how to secure data accessibility in Azure Storage is vital for organizations for accurate access control, activity logging, and getting usage metrics. As security can be easily controlled and managed with Azure, organizations can use a range of policies for achieving the degree of access control that their applications need.

As data volumes grow exponentially and become more complex, it is getting more and more difficult to manage and store this data. This has made organizations bank on public cloud storage, such as Azure Storage, for realizing the scalability and accessibility they aim. Benefits of Azure Storage infrastructure are significant, however, securing the storage account calls for additional responsibilities.

What Approach Must Organizations Take?

Organizations have realized that public cloud computing needs a novel approach to security. For its Azure cloud, Microsoft offers a secure infrastructure and operational security. Organizations are needed to maintain their responsibility to secure their application workloads, data, and resources that they control. It is imperative that organizations understand the shared responsibility model and meet security responsibilities at their end.

It is vital for organizations to ensure that their cloud computing resources are secure by configuring and leveraging services such as Azure. The Azure Storage infrastructure enables organizations to safeguard their cloud environment by following security best practices. It also offers them with a robust security solution that delivers a comprehensive visibility of their infrastructure security.

Key Benefits of Azure Storage Infrastructure

Following are some benefits that organizations gain from Azure Storage infrastructure.

Organizations can enable a secure transfer for ensuring that the data encryption is in transit. This enhances the security of their storage account by allowing account requests through a secure connection.
Azure Storage enables organizations to encrypt their data similar to the way it is stored in the data center. Also, it allows for automatic decryption of the data for organizations to gain secure access.
Organizations can leverage the storage account access keys, which are periodically regenerated. Also, they can ensure undermining any inadvertent exposure or access to these keys.
Azure Storage infrastructure allows organizations to protect their data at rest by enabling service encryption.
Organizations can private and disable anonymous access to blob containers. This allows them to give read-only access to resources without sharing their account key and eliminating the need for a shared access signature.

To Sum Up

With Azure Storage, organizations can realize a secure infrastructure that is massively scalable and available worldwide. This helps them in bolstering their cybersecurity, especially when cyberattacks are growing in sophistication and complexity. Microsoft continues to add advanced threat protection features to its Azure Storage, with an aim to deliver an additional layer of security intelligence that spots malware uploads to cloud storage accounts. As more and more organizations move to the cloud for leveraging its flexibility and performance benefits, Azure Storage will see high adoption, helping organizations in maintaining a secure infrastructure.

Talk to our Azure experts. Book a free consultation here.

Why Public Cloud Security is A Shared Responsibility

Posted on July 15, 2020June 16, 2021 by Veeraj Thaploo

While public cloud is seeing high reverence among organizations, associated security still remains a hot topic for debate. According to Forbes, over 83% of organizational workloads are estimated to run on public cloud. While it is indispensable for organizations to provide digital safety, the line of responsibility for cloud security between vendors and enterprises is becoming blurred.

The shared responsibility model emerged as a viable solution to maintaining robust public cloud security. To ensure a highly secure cloud environment, organizations must educate their business stakeholders on the shared cloud security for mitigating issues entailed by errors of internal stakeholders. The organizations must also focus on creating a team of cloud security that engulfs diverse and proficient skill sets.

Important Aspects of the Shared Responsibility Model

By focusing on key aspects of the shared responsibility model, organizations can secure their data and networks in the public cloud. Also, with these, organizations can ensure enhanced security while enabling faster deployment and alleviating misconfigurations for all of their cloud-based applications.

The cloud service providers are accountable for the protection and ensuring availability of the cloud services and infrastructure. The cloud infrastructure encompasses the networking, hardware, software, and facilities, which run cloud services of the respective vendor.

Organizations are responsible for their cloud-deployed assets and management. Organizations design their own novel strategy for security and manage risks for cloud services, data, and assets they add in the public cloud. They are responsible for managing their data with encryption options, classifying their assets, and leveraging IAM tools for accurate permissions.

Why is the Shared Responsibility Model Important?

As certain boundaries differ between applications, the emphasis of cloud service providers is hinged on protecting infrastructure and services that include networking, software, and hardware. Organizations are responsible for their security infrastructure that protects the data with factors such as user identity verification, access control for high-risk areas, safeguarding credential theft, and ensuring that applications are not leveraged as delivery mechanisms for cyberattacks.

In the digital transformation journey, several organizations forget their responsibility for protecting the data stored off-site. This unawareness poses risks to storage components and makes them prone to cyberattacks. The actual risk lies in futile objectives of organizations who look to achieve the bare minimum from their cloud migration strategies.

According to Gartner, the public cloud market is expected to grow by 17% in 2020, with outcomes-associated expectations from cloud investments presumably being higher. Most businesses are making heavy investments in the public cloud architecture. This is mainly because organizations continuously gain an unparalleled agility in IT operations, which helps them maintain a competitive edge.

To Conclude

Proactive organizations have been skeptical about handing the security of their infrastructure to the cloud service providers. However, most businesses are now concentrating on their cybersecurity budgets and making investments in cloud security. More and more organizations are spending on data security and protection.

Organizations are increasingly devoting great amounts of resources to reinforce their defenses and embed security-by-design. Thus, security in the public cloud is a shared responsibility, wherein organizations have a major role to play starting from the phase where they choose a cloud provider for managing their infrastructure.

What do you need to make your cloud 100% secure? Consult the cloud experts who have done it for many clients. Book an appointment here

Month: July 2020

How Cloud Computing Drives Remote Working

Remote Working and the Cloud