With the wide scale push for cloud invading most every industry, enterprise data continues to evoke an increasingly disparate status—often split among hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Despite the evolving split of data between cloud, multiple clouds, and on-premises data centers, IT leaders continue to point their data strategies toward the cloud due to the wealth of opportunity it promises. While this may be true, cloud journeys are still wrought with a variety of challenges, obstacles, and other detrimental factors that impact the cloud’s potential success.
To explore best practices and strategies for attaining a successful cloud journey, experts joined DBTA’s webinar, Achieving Performance, Scalability, and Security on Your Cloud Journey, offering a discussion around brands, features, and migration techniques, as well as key IT issues such as performance, scalability, and security.
Clint Sprauve, director of product marketing at Delphix, pointed webinar viewers to an integral statement: multi-cloud increases both data complexity and risk. While the cloud offers great opportunities, it also offers point solutions with differing functionality through APIs, instituting a widespread lack of consistent controls. With thousands of apps, databases, tools, and developers at work, the success of the cloud is thoroughly constrained by its overwhelming breadth of functionality.
Sprauve argued that a multi-cloud data operating model, which unifies data governance, compliance, and automation across applications and clouds, is key toward an optimized, efficient, and secure cloud.
With the Delphix DevOps Data Platform—a multi-cloud data governance solution for the application lifecycle—enterprises can achieve automated, secure, compliant, and efficient cloud data centers, all supported by a distributed mesh library with catalog, tagging, and access control.
Eric Schoepfle, data specialist at Satori, continued the conversation by explaining that there is an undeniable cost of not having an access strategy for enterprise data. Between project delays, slow adoption, ramping overhead costs, low productivity, and increased risk, omitting a data strategy entirely derails any organization’s business objectives.
To best support enterprises for success, Schoepfle argued that there is an undeniable need for a data security platform, where he implored viewers to manage access to data as one would manage access to applications.
Satori’s Security Platform brings the data you need when you need it, all while being automated, secured, and audited. The platform mitigates the exact challenges previously mentioned, accelerating projects, reducing costs and overhead, and eliminating risks, further underpinned by minimal change management, self-service, and immediate ROI.
Why cloud? Well, according to Michael Agarwal, global practice leader in cloud databases, SRE, and NoSQL at Datavail, the technical drivers are expansive, ranging from cost reduction, autoscaling, improved performance, modernization ease, improved security, and more. With the wide variety of opportunities that the cloud offers, a centralized guide is necessary for any organization’s cloud journey.
Agarwal pointed toward a “Cloud Center of Excellence,” or a highly interconnected system between DevOps engineers, software developers/data engineers, and SREs/DBAs that acts as a cloud adopted enabler, not an enabler of “red tape.” This system, connected by certifications, partnerships, and training, ensures that business transformation is continuously aligned with technology transformation, thereby optimizing the cloud journey across an enterprise.
Modernization will need to occur at every level of the enterprise, Agarwal continued. Modernization of applications, analytics, databases, infrastructures, and security are critical toward cloud success as well as multifaceted in what they require. Knowing what is important for each tenet, as well as how to implement those solutions and methods effectively, is the foundation for a successful cloud journey.
Bryan Batty, senior director of solution security at Actian, highlighted the five top concerns for cloud migration security:
- Identity and access management
- Compliance and regulatory issues
- Service availability
- Multitenancy security concerns
- Insider threats
Fortunately, there are ways to mitigate each of these potential risks to security when operating in the cloud. Batty explained that:
- For identity and access management, enterprises should map roles and responsibilities up front, use the CSP native IAM, set multi-factor authentication as default, and further impose proper access controls.
- For compliance and regulatory issues, enterprises should understand what applies to their business needs and ensure their cloud provider meets necessary requirements.
- For service availability, enterprises should institute autoscaling and load balancing, backup and restore strategies, disaster recovery, and classify and prioritize critical systems.
- For multitenancy security concerns, enterprises should employ contract language that says they can acquire their own hardware, understand security measures put in place to prevent that type of breach, and protect enterprise applications and data.
- For insider threats, enterprises should consider implementing an Insider Threat Program, an anti-phishing program, perform behavioral analysis, institute a zero-trust architecture, and employ the use of watermarks.
For an in-depth discussion and review of best practices, strategies, and solutions for the cloud, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.