Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

How Using a Cloud Provider Impacts Security Risks

A company planning to secure its IT environment generally focuses on a broad range of vulnerabilities to its data center as well as ways to safeguard sensitive corporate, customer, and partner information wherever it’s located. A hybrid cloud environment changes things because, although ultimately it’s your company’s responsibility to protect and secure your applications and information, many challenges arise when you’re working with an external provider. Here are a few of those challenges:

Multi-tenancy: In a multi-tenant architecture, a software application partitions its data and configuration so that each customer has a customized virtual application instance. However, your applications and data exist on the same servers as other companies using the same service provider, and these users are accessing their resources simultaneously. You may not know the names of the other companies that are sharing these servers. So, if one company’s data or application is breached or fails for any number of reasons, your application may be affected.

Attacks that affect you, even though you aren’t the target: If your company makes use of a public cloud, you may be the collateral damage in an attack, even if it wasn’t meant for you. Consider a ...