It’s time to set aside the one-size-fits-all mentality for cloud environments as an effective approach. Companies are embracing multi-cloud for their IT infrastructure for a couple of good reasons:
- For some, the addition of multiple clouds may help achieve certain business goals while bridging to critical on-premise solutions.
- Others may use multi-cloud as a way to improve resiliency or add redundancy, reducing costs and avoiding vendor lock-in.
Taking a multi-cloud approach creates an impact across the organization – and using infrastructure as a service (IaaS) can especially affect security and networking. Multi-cloud environments require a balance of giving users access to applications but still applying consistent security policy across disparate infrastructure and applications.
One way that companies are addressing this is by the adoption of zero trust network access (ZTNA). ZTNA uses a combination of strategies to protect resources, taking the position that all users and devices are considered untrustworthy until proven otherwise. With tools like multi-factor authentication, role-based access, and next-generation firewalls, ZTNA is a policy that can be applied in a multi-cloud environment.
To effectively manage a multi-cloud IT infrastructure, there are three important parts:
Policy: Organizations require a common security and enforcement framework from which to manage deployments across the proprietary architectures of different cloud providers, each built on unique frameworks with their own application programming interfaces. The security and networking architecture must be able to work across the cloud to utilize the native features of each cloud and manage them with automation.
Application Awareness: The corporate network must be application aware in order to recognize resource availability, real-time network conditions, and capacity – and optimize the end user experience. It should also be able to deprioritize unimportant network traffic and offer preferential treatment to time-sensitive transmissions.
Integrated Security and Networking: In order to reach their full performance capabilities, security and networking must be converged. Otherwise, the result is gaps in coverage that leave the environment vulnerable to a breach. A fully-integrated security and networking solution offers improved communications, automation, and coordinated enforcement. The possibility for a breach is reduced because of deep packet inspection and traffic segmentation.
When choosing a path forward with a multi-cloud environment, organizations can achieve all three of these requirements through the implementation of software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN).
With a cost-effective design for multi-cloud IT environments, SD-WAN allows for the connection of branch locations to cloud services and orchestrates comprehensive deployments from a geographically dispersed organization. Ultimately, SD-WAN offers a way to optimal security without sacrificing application performance.
A multi-cloud IT environment offers challenges in the area of complexity, but SD-WAN is a way to simplify and optimize effectiveness of the network. Contact us at Cloud Source to learn more about the specific benefits SD-WAN delivers.