Page 128 - Cyber Defense eMagazine June 2020 Edition

Security in A Multi-Cloud Environment

By Paul Nicholson, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, A10 Networks

As companies leverage a multi-cloud strategy to improve IT operations and provide better services to
their customers, they can’t afford to overlook the implications for security. This is especially true with the
emergence of a new paradigm to run multiple disparate compute environments for application delivery.
In fact, while issues like creeping complexity, non-existent cross-platform visibility, and multiple vendor
standards all compete for IT focus in a multi-cloud environment, enterprise leaders cite security as the
top challenge of all.

This trend was illustrated in a global survey of IT and business executives conducted by A10 Networks
in partnership with the Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network. In the survey, respondents
reported that ensuring strong security across clouds, networks, applications and data will be critical for
realising the advantages of multi-cloud IT. This is clearly a work in progress; to date, only 11 percent
believe they have been highly successful in seeing the full value of their multi-cloud strategy, while a
majority (51 percent) rate themselves as only somewhat successful or unsuccessful so far.

A quick web search will uncover many cases of vulnerabilities and real-life incidents. In one blog post by
VMware, it is noted that it’s the job of IT and security teams, not just cloud providers, to take care of many
aspects of security. To stop sophisticated bots, frequent data exfiltration of personally identifiable
information (PII), application attacks, and other threats, it’s essential to implement a security strategy
across all your clouds, private or public that is as stringent as the one used for your on-premises solutions,
if not more so.

Cyber Defense eMagazine –June 2020 Edition 128
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