What is Hybrid Cloud Security?

What is hybrid cloud security?

Hybrid cloud security refers to the integration of tools, practices, and processes designed to secure applications, data, and workflows across both public cloud and private infrastructure, ensuring consistent security policies and controls across diverse environments.

Typically, hybrid clouds also include a unified control plane (based on a platform or service like Azure Arc, AWS Outposts, or Google Anthos) that makes it possible to deploy and manage applications in a consistent way across the public and private components of the hybrid cloud environment.

This means that when you create a hybrid cloud, some of your applications and data reside on public cloud infrastructure, while others live in a private data center. The purpose of hybrid cloud security is to address the security risks that may arise within this type of environment.

Hybrid cloud security challenges

Securing hybrid cloud environments and workflows can be challenging because hybrid clouds are especially complex – and that complexity can give rise to unique security challenges that don’t exist in other types of cloud or on-prem architectures.

Diverse infrastructure

By definition, a hybrid cloud includes multiple infrastructure components or platforms. This diversity creates security challenges because it’s more difficult to enforce security best practices across disparate platforms than it is if all of your workloads reside in a single environment.

For example, whereas you can use a public cloud provider’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) framework to manage access permissions in the public cloud part of your hybrid environment, your private data center may not support IAM. This leads to greater complexity – and more opportunity to introduce configuration mistakes that could lead to security risks – in the hybrid environment.

Varying user identities

The way you manage user identities may also vary between the public and private portions of a hybrid cloud environment. For instance, you might use a public cloud provider’s authentication service when users log into public cloud infrastructure but rely on a separate authentication provider to manage access to private infrastructure.

The complexity of user management within hybrid cloud environments may lead to security risks because it makes it more challenging to avoid issues like giving users excessive permissions.

Inconsistent visibility

Your level of visibility into different parts of a hybrid cloud environment may vary. In general, you’ll have more visibility into and control over private infrastructure than over the public cloud portion of your hybrid cloud, since you own only the private infrastructure.

This means that you may not be able to monitor all parts of the cloud environment in a consistent way, making it more challenging to discover security threats and risks.

Inconsistent security tooling

In some cases, security tools may only work with certain parts of your hybrid cloud environment. This is especially likely if you use security monitoring services offered by public cloud providers, whose solutions usually don’t support private or on-prem infrastructure, even if said infrastructure forms part of a hybrid cloud.

Hybrid cloud security: A necessity or a choice?

Given the inherent security challenges of hybrid cloud, you might think that avoiding it altogether is the best way to mitigate risk. But increasingly, this is not a realistic choice.

As we mentioned, more and more organizations are realizing that they can’t rely on just one type of infrastructure model. They need the flexibility of simultaneously keeping some workloads while running others in the public cloud. This explains why 73 percent of enterprises report having adopted a hybrid cloud strategy.

From this perspective, hybrid cloud – and, by extension, hybrid cloud security – isn’t a choice. It’s a necessity.

The benefits of hybrid cloud security

An effective hybrid cloud security strategy gives organizations the flexibility to deploy workloads wherever is most appropriate, while keeping security risks in check.

More specifically, hybrid cloud security offers benefits such as:

• Centralized monitoring of security threats and risks across all parts of the hybrid cloud environment.
• The ability to enforce security and compliance controls across both public and private cloud infrastructure.
• Access to security capabilities that may not be available through the control plane software used to manage a hybrid cloud.
• A consistent approach to identifying and remediating security issues across all parts of the cloud environment.
• Hybrid cloud security improves data protection by ensuring data is encrypted both in transit and at rest while employing Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools to safeguard sensitive information across environments.
• Hybrid cloud security enhances scalability and flexibility by enabling organizations to scale security measures dynamically and deploy workloads securely in the environment that best suits their needs, whether public or private.
• Hybrid cloud security advances threat detection and prevention by leveraging AI and threat intelligence to identify and mitigate sophisticated attacks across complex environments in real time.

Understanding the hybrid cloud security architecture

The exact way that hybrid cloud security solutions work can vary. But in general, the key architectural components of hybrid cloud security include software services that operate at the convergence of the public and private parts of the hybrid cloud environment. From there, the services deliver security capabilities such as:

• Enforcement of consistent access controls to manage who can do what across the hybrid cloud.
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP) features, which help to discover sensitive data that may not be stored securely.
• Vulnerability scanning and management, to identify security risks within applications deployed in the hybrid cloud.
• Encryption of data as it moves across the cloud, which reduces the risk of unauthorized access.
• Network segmentation, which can help reduce security risks by isolating workloads at the network level.
• Backup and disaster recovery, to help recover quickly in the event of a hybrid cloud breach.
• Monitoring of network traffic, access logs, application requests, and other data sources to detect potential security risks.

By providing these security capabilities as services that work in a unified way across both the public and private parts of the hybrid cloud environment, hybrid cloud security solutions make it easier to secure hybrid environments without having to juggle disparate security tools and frameworks.

Factors to consider when choosing a hybrid cloud security solution

When evaluating hybrid cloud security options, consider factors such as:

• Supported clouds or infrastructure platforms: Which cloud platforms or services does the solution support?
• Integrations: How easily does the solution integrate with other security, compliance or monitoring tools or services your organization uses?
• Compliance enforcement: Can the solution automatically discover compliance risks that are relevant to your organization or industry?
• Scalability: Is the solution able to scale as your hybrid cloud environment grows in size and complexity?
• Threat and risk detection capabilities: Which types of threats and risks can the solution detect, and how adept is it at identifying sophisticated attacks that are designed to evade detection?
• Automation features: The solution should support automation for tasks like patch management, compliance checks, and incident response to enhance efficiency and minimize human error.
• Unified management: It should provide unified management through a centralized dashboard, enabling comprehensive monitoring and control across the hybrid cloud environment.
• Customizability: It should allow customization to align with your organization’s specific security policies, compliance requirements, and operational workflows.

Best practices for hybrid cloud security

To get the most from hybrid cloud security tools and processes, consider the following best practices.

• Implement a zero-trust architecture: Ensure continuous verification of users and devices, enforce least-privilege access, and segment networks to limit potential attack surfaces.
• Use robust encryption: Encrypt data both at rest and in transit, using strong encryption protocols to protect sensitive information across hybrid environments. This is particularly important because hybrid cloud services may not encrypt all data by default; you may have to enable encryption explicitly.
• Centralize visibility and monitoring: Deploy unified tools to monitor activities across on-premises and cloud systems enabling quick threat detection and response.
• Automate security processes: Leverage automation for tasks like patch management, compliance checks, and incident response to enhance efficiency and reduce human error.
• Conduct regular security audits: Conduct regular security audits to identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance gaps in your hybrid cloud environment.
• Standardize security policies: Standardize security policies across public and private cloud components to prevent configuration drift and ensure consistency.
• Segment networks: Segment networks to isolate sensitive workloads and limit the spread of potential breaches within the hybrid cloud.
• Enable advanced threat detection: Enable advanced threat detection by using AI-powered solutions to identify and mitigate sophisticated threats in real time across the hybrid cloud.

Securing hybrid clouds with Aqua

As a highly flexible and extensible cloud security platform, Aqua provides the robust features you need to secure even the most complex hybrid cloud environment. From detecting container security risks, to monitoring cloud VMs for suspicious activity, to managing vulnerabilities and far beyond, Aqua makes it easy to secure workloads across all facets of your hybrid cloud environment.

Learn more by requesting a demo.