Have Cloud Security Needs Changed Since COVID-19?

Cloud is not new. The term dates back at least twenty years. Some people will tell you that the term “cloud” just means using someone else’s computing environment, and in some ways, this is where it started. But today, cloud architectures mean so much more, with every element of the infrastructure and platforms being software configurable, and elastic.

If you watch any American Football, you’re likely to have seen Mike Singletary (football legend) extolling the value of a hybrid cloud environment. So the cloud is now as mainstream as your favorite beer or chips. Even if you are not a football fan, you will still see some advert related to the cloud, and probably many, on different mediums.

What has happened recently that has changed the emphasis on the cloud? One of the key elements has been the COVID-19 Pandemic which forced many people to rethink how things can work. COVID-19 taught virtually every business what it truly takes to deliver a pure e-business, from the ability to continually update the user experience to deal with changing demands, to the need to test and manipulate logistics and supplier-related relationships.

While pre-COVID plans prioritized the launch of new products, the opening of new offices, and the expansion of sales forces, for example, COVID and Post-COVID priorities have changed, and now application stack change management, compliance to governance and regulations, and the streamlining of the customer on-line experience have become priorities. And this has accelerated the need to capitalize on the benefits of cloud-level thinking.

One of the historical reasons that many companies avoided the cloud was the concern of losing control of their data. But with most people doing their jobs from home, cloud architectures now actually offer a higher level of overall control. If the data is not readily available to these remote workers directly, you might expect that at least some of that data ends up on personal devices (despite corporate directives to the contrary). When they can access that directly, they can leave it resident in the cloud.

Another factor to consider is the latency of data. Direct access to the cloud makes a lot more sense than having to tunnel via VPN or other technology to get access to the data.

These and other similar arguments have led to many projects that had been put off year to year, suddenly be priority projects. The recent security exposure related to SolarWinds has also been a catalyst to migration to the cloud.

But moving to the cloud is not as simple as flicking a switch. Companies leveraging the cloud are somewhere on a continuum from limited hosting to hybrid deployments, to full cloud implementations. There are many situations to consider that change depending on where you are on this continuum. Where you determine what you need to consider.

On the most simplistic end of the scale, you could simply be backing up to the cloud. In this scenario, your primary concern is going to be about the reliability and security of the service provider. There are no implications to your business processes. Everything continues to run and process even if the cloud service has an outage. The number of people that interact with that cloud service would also be limited.

At the other end of the spectrum, some companies have turned over their entire infrastructure and processes to a cloud provider. In this model, any issues that arise are going to directly affect the business. An unreliable service could put a company out of business.

It’s probably no surprise that the focus would be on hybrid cloud deployments. Because with hybrid, you are deciding what makes sense to move and what to retain in legacy environments. Some components are more easily moved while some take considerable effort and planning.

When companies consider migrating to a cloud environment, the initial thinking is normally focused on infrastructure, where datacenter systems can easily be mimicked on cloud environments, and system performance can be defined by the number and properties of processors, memory, storage, and networking systems, that can all be accurately defined in software.

However, the next area to think about is the middleware. How is your cloud environment going to talk to your on-premise environment? How can you migrate your application with all of its inter and intra application connectivity without breaking anything?

Nastel Navigator is designed especially for this. Navigator allows you to deploy and migrate configurations and data of IBM MQ, Apache Kafka, and TIBCO EMS securely with auditing, governance, and automation in application-related scheduled batches.

Please visit Red Hat Marketplace, AWS Marketplace, or the Nastel website and download a free trial to see the benefits of Nastel Navigator in your environment.