Five Predictions for Hybrid Cloud Environments in 2015

It’s once again time to make predictions and identify trends for the coming year. The debate over public versus private cloud has been brewing for a while now and, in 2015, many organizations will find that a compromise between the two – hybrid cloud – is actually a better fit for their needs.

According to Gartner, 75 percent of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by 2015, so organizations must understand how the hybrid cloud environment extends the security policy management challenges of the on-premise data center. In this slideshow, AlgoSec, a security policy management company, discusses five predictions for hybrid cloud environments.

2015: The Hybrid Cloud

Click through for five predictions focusing on hybrid cloud and related security issues for 2015, as identified by AlgoSec, a security management company.

Full Scale, Enterprise Public Cloud Deployments

We will begin to see companies viewing the cloud as a strategic investment and move toward full scale, enterprise-sanctioned public cloud deployments. According to a recent survey, 70 percent of survey respondents anticipate that they will deploy 10 to 60 percent of their business applications on public IaaS platforms within the next three years.

Managing Security Policies Across Hybrid Environments

Organizations will need to face and solve significant security challenges as they attempt to unify their security policy strategies across hybrid cloud environments, including:

• Lack of visibility across the hybrid environment
• Lack of tools to extend the corporate policy across the hybrid environment
• Lack of operational workflows across the hybrid environment
• Problems demonstrating compliance

AlgoSec predicts that both vendors and enterprises will be scrambling to solve these challenges through product enhancements and extensions, partnerships and integrations. For example, Amazon Web Services followed by Microsoft Azure have already become the IaaS platforms of choice for most organizations, and therefore development and integration efforts will focus on them first.

Fewer Shadow IT Deployments

The ease of use and availability of public clouds create another threat to IT security. Developers whose requirements are not addressed by IT can quickly spin up public cloud services without IT even knowing – causing the worst kind of security gaps, ones that the organization doesn’t even know exist. Therefore, security teams must ensure that they evolve from the “bottleneck” department to a business enabler that adopts agile and orchestrated processes required to support cloud environments and fast application delivery.

Adoption of Automation to Manage Security

The market for cloud security is ripe for consolidation. While many vendors offer rich functionality for companies that are entirely deployed in the cloud, they do not support traditional on-premise firewalls. Yet, companies that are in the process of deploying hybrid environments are not getting rid of their on-premise data centers any time soon, and they are facing the same core network security management challenges for their public IaaS as for their on-premise data centers. Therefore, there is a real need to manage the network security policy across both environments consistently, and we will see more organizations adopting automation and orchestration to manage security at the “speed of cloud.”

Changes in Team Structure, Responsibility and Hiring

IT organizations must figure out how they will determine who manages security for public IaaS platforms. Is it the responsibility of IT operations or information security teams within the company, or the platform providers? AlgoSec predicts that there will be significant changes in structure and responsibilities of these teams in 2015. Furthermore, organizations will invest in products that simplify network security management and then choose good analysts who can evaluate and act on multiple sources of information. By the time the “perfect” expert comes along, you could have someone smart, if less experienced, proficiently using the tools you’ve already had in place for months.