Top Hybrid Cloud Security Challenges

What is Hybrid Cloud?

A hybrid cloud environment refers to a mixed computing environment deployed across public and private clouds, including on-prem infrastructure or edge locations. The idea behind hybrid clouds is that they can be tailored to an organization’s needs, and there are various architectures depending on how and where you deploy your computing, storage, and applications.

With multiple environments to select and combine, you can find the best approach to fit the needs of specific applications and data. For example, maintaining control over sensitive business data and storing it on-prem while taking advantage of public cloud services. This is particularly beneficial for organizations that must comply with strict data privacy regulations.

Hybrid cloud deployments are also popular because they are the natural outcome of digital transformation projects that slowly move workloads to the cloud. Migrating everything in one go, ripping and replacing all of your legacy infrastructure, brings considerable risks. It is more common to strategically move applications to the cloud slowly over time. This leaves organizations with a hybrid cloud deployment containing both public and private clouds.

7 Major Hybrid Cloud Security Challenges

#1. Greater Complexity

Hybrid cloud deployments and managing applications, data, and workloads across multiple environments inherently increase the complexity of your network. This makes it harder to ensure consistent security across your IT infrastructure and easier to introduce misconfigurations, leading to vulnerabilities.

Many hybrid cloud risks are rooted in the challenges of managing a more complex network. You need to integrate different kinds of clouds, overseeing and orchestrating the connections between them for a smooth user experience without sacrificing security. You likely also need to incorporate multiple security tools to ensure coverage across public and private clouds or on-prem systems.

#2. Extending Your Attack Surface

This added complexity also extends your attack surface, providing more entry points for threat attackers to probe for weaknesses. For example, a company with remote workers that manages a private cloud and utilizes public cloud services has many more data pathways to protect. These paths also typically require multiple communication mediums, such as VPNs between user devices and the private cloud or APIs to access public cloud services.

Hybrid cloud deployments and the spread of workloads across multiple environments offer new opportunities for threat actors to breach your systems and gain unauthorized access. Hybrid cloud security must focus on protecting every endpoint to prevent security gaps.

#3. Shared Security Responsibility

The nature of migrating data to the cloud is that you’re trusting third-party providers to maintain security. This is called shared security responsibility, and you must understand cloud providers’ service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure they provide the level of protection you require to remain compliant. Alternatively, you may have to implement additional security measures or find an alternative vendor.

#4. Ensuring Compliance Across Multiple Environments

Compliance issues in hybrid environments are common as your data continually moves across environments. With regulatory requirements governing how you handle consumer data, maintaining compliance across multiple environments and providers can be difficult.

#5. Visibility Issues

Visibility and a clear understanding of your network are vital to identifying vulnerabilities and potential attacks. Hybrid cloud risks increase when each environment is managed separately. Conversely, visibility is significantly improved with centralized management. This requires cloud monitoring tools that integrate with your different environments and ensure proper monitoring for suspicious traffic and incident response procedures.

#6. Identity and Access Management (IAM) Implementation

One of the main hybrid cloud security challenges that comes with increased data access is maintaining proper authentication processes. To prevent unauthorized access, you need robust IAM systems that operate within the decentralized nature of a hybrid cloud deployment.

#7. Maintaining Data Protection

Managing your data as it moves and is stored across various platforms is key to hybrid cloud security. Data typically moves between cloud environments across the public internet. This opens it up to a range of attacks, including man-in-the-middle attacks. To maintain data protection while running hybrid cloud deployments, you need to implement a consistent strategy with proper access controls, encryption, and backup contingencies in place.

Maximize Hybrid Cloud Security with Check Point

Following these best practices and overcoming hybrid cloud security challenges is easy with Check Point’s AI-powered Hybrid Cloud Protection. Simplify complex hybrid cloud deployments with prevention-first security that stops attacks, secures connectivity, and ensures compliance. Hybrid Cloud Security from Check Point offers a new approach to securing your network as you migrate to the cloud with:

• Smarter AI-powered analysis automatically identifies and blocks attacks with greater accuracy to reduce alert fatigue.
• Unified protections across your hybrid environment.
• Scalable security that adapts to expanding infrastructure.
• The highest scores across Miercom’s security efficacy assessment, including a 99.9% malware block rate.

Transform your hybrid cloud journey by maximizing security while minimizing admin overhead. Discover more with a free demo and cloud security health-check from Check Point.