What is Multi-Cloud Storage Technology?

Before we jump right in into multi-cloud security, we first need to understand what exactly is multi-cloud technology.

Multi-cloud technology is the use of multiple cloud computing and multi-cloud storage services in a single network architecture. This refers to the distribution of different cloud assets, applications, assets, and more across multiple cloud environments.

Multi-cloud technology aims to eliminate the reliance on any single cloud provider by utilizing two or more public clouds as well as private clouds.

Organizations that do not want to depend on a single cloud provider may choose to use multi-cloud technology so that they can use resources from several cloud providers to get the best benefits from each unique service.

Why Use Multi-Cloud Storage Technology?

The next important question that comes to mind is why use multi-cloud technology in the first place? Well, multi-cloud technology provides a number of benefits and allows organizations to select multi-cloud storage and multi-cloud services from different providers simply because some are better for certain tasks than others.

Other than this, multi-cloud also gives organizations a lot of flexibility and the ability to avoid vendor lock-in.

Multi-cloud also provides multi-cloud disaster recovery in a way that it ensures that the organization always has the computing resources and data storage available so they can avoid downtime.

Lastly, multi-cloud technology can also help organizations greatly in achieving their goals for governance, risk management, and compliance regulations.

Multi-Cloud Security

Multi-cloud technology undoubtedly brings a lot of benefits and convince to the table but unfortunately, it also brings a lot of security risk alongside as well. Organizations that integrate multi-cloud networks, increase the vulnerabilities of their infrastructure by offering hackers a wider surface for attack. This places security at the forefront of any multi-cloud strategy.

Understanding Multi-Cloud Security

In order to understand multi-cloud security a bit better, let’s look take a look at this with an example of a commercial bank, and how they handled the journey to multi-cloud while maintaining the security and compliance they needed to keep their customer’s data safe.

Let’s start at the beginning. The bank has a mobile application that allows their clients to check their balances and transfer money between accounts and do all the things that most people can do on any mobile banking applications.

Their customers are reasonably happy, and they’re providing industry-standard capabilities for a mobile application. Their IT operations team is pretty happy as well because, since all of their components are running inside their data center, they’re easily able to monitor the security and compliance of the entire architecture.

Now, the bank wants to modernize. They want to give themselves the ability to take advantage of the future of public cloud services and add new capabilities to their application. So, the first thing they do is move their application to microservices. Microservices allow them to decompose their application into smaller components, which gives them advantages because they can be developed quicker and independent of each other, and they can also be portable and move potentially to a public cloud should the bank wish to do that.

So, once they’ve gone through this transformation, their customers are in about the same spot as they were before. The application is exactly as it was before, the IT Operations team is happy, they still have a security compliance view that covers the entire data center and all the components are inside the data center, but the bank isn’t done.

Their modernization journey takes them to add a new microservice, a virtual assistant. This virtual assistant will connect to services in the public cloud. In the public cloud, they’ll take advantage of artificial intelligence services, weather services, and traffic services to provide their clients with the closest ATM to them and updates on whether that impending snowstorm is going to close their branch office in the next couple of days.

This, of course, makes their end users very happy. It makes their developers very happy because they get to take advantage of new cloud services and build them into their application.

Operations, on the other hand, has some concerns. By opening up this connection to public cloud services, they have now exposed potential risks to secure client data in the system of the record out to public cloud services. This can expose the bank to things that could tarnish their brand, which could cause them to lose customers and lose shareholder value.

So, what’s the solution?

The bank needs to bring in a single central control plane that allows them to put compliance policies across all of their application components, both on-premise and in the cloud, that lets IT Operations be happy that they have security and compliance in the same way that they did when they were managing the application on-premise.

So, at the end of the day, when you add a multi-cloud environment plus a control plane for governance and security, your developers are happy and there are no risks of any security or compliance issues. This way you will keep getting new customers with your trusted services and your company won’t end up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for losing your customer data.

Multi-Cloud Security Solutions

Nowadays, there are plenty of vendors that offer multi-cloud security solutions, like; DELL, Unitrends, StoneFly etc. Cloud gateway, for instance, is a good solution for handling and managing multi-cloud environments and if chosen the right vendor, it can offer great security as well.

Other than cloud gateways; multi-cloud backup and multi-cloud disaster recovery are also great solutions for multi-cloud security or IT security with multi-cloud technology. If chosen the right vendor, organizations can take multi-cloud security to the next level.

Conclusion:

The key to a successful and efficient multi-cloud security strategy is finding a good, dedicated and reliable multi-cloud security solution that will provide flawless coverage between the clouds. Choosing the right vendor goes a long way as it allows you take advantage of all the benefits multi-cloud has to offer while also maintaining a secure and compliant environment.

Author Bio:
Qais Noori is the technical marketing and SEO expert at StoneFly, Inc. since 2015.  StoneFly  is the provider of enterprise-grade and value-tier storage, backup and DR appliances, physical, virtual, and cloud-based solutions, data migration services, and solutions for managed service providers (MSP). StoneFly’s robust range of enterprise products includes purpose-built NAS, SAN, unified NAS + SAN, and hyperconverged solutions (storage and backup & DR).

Qais has been regularly contributing to the technology niche sharing valuable and actionable insights on data storage, backup, and DR for enterprise-grade workloads.

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