Navigating and Resolving 7 Key Cybersecurity Hurdles in Hybrid Cloud Setups

In today's digital landscape, businesses are increasingly turning to hybrid cloud solutions to meet their evolving needs. However, the complexities of managing such environments can pose significant security challenges. To address these issues, a proactive and unified security approach is essential.

Google Cloud's BucketLock feature is one such solution that empowers users to set data retention policies for public buckets, helping to prevent accidental exposure of sensitive information. But what other measures can businesses take to secure their hybrid cloud environments?

Enhance Visibility and Control

Deploying network tools that classify traffic by application and provide complete monitoring and analytics across hybrid environments is crucial. This helps close visibility gaps and detect misconfigurations early.

Implement Consistent Security Policies

Businesses should establish consistent and strict security policies across on-premises and cloud environments. This includes blocking unapproved applications, enforcing strong access controls like role-based permissions, and multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Apply Zero Trust Principles

Adopting Zero Trust principles can significantly reduce risks from inconsistent policies and network integration issues. By validating every user, device, and connection, segmenting workloads, and inspecting unknown threats, businesses can minimise the potential for lateral movement.

Integrate Identity and Access Management (IAM) Systems

Tying permissions to users, enforcing MFA, regularly auditing permissions, and using IAM tools to manage authentication and access revocation effectively can help strengthen IAM.

Use Encryption

Encrypting data in transit and at rest, such as using AES-256 or TLS 1.3, is vital for maintaining data confidentiality and complying with industry standards.

Ensure Compliance and Governance

Deploying compliance automation tools that continuously audit and enforce adherence to regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS, tailored to the specific industry, can help businesses stay compliant.

Strengthen Network Integration

Establishing secure connections like VPNs, dedicated network links, and high-speed WANs can provide encryption, low latency, and redundancy, ensuring seamless unified hybrid cloud operation.

Address the Cloud Skills Gap

Engaging expert partners, providing ongoing training, and using scalable and flexible tools can help businesses address the cloud skills gap, reducing dependency on scarce in-house cloud expertise.

Automate Workload Management and Deployment

Using orchestration tools to ensure consistent configurations and reduce human error contributing to misconfigurations can further enhance security.

By combining these practices, businesses can create a resilient hybrid cloud environment that mitigates risks from visibility gaps, misconfigurations, inconsistent policies, network challenges, IAM weaknesses, compliance complexities, and skill shortages.

Mistakes such as accidentally granting public access to a data bucket can expose sensitive information to the entire Internet. Implementing single sign-on and multi-factor authentication can enhance security and simplify the login process.

Different regions and industries have their own privacy and security laws, making it difficult to stay compliant in a hybrid cloud setup. Standardised policies and unified controls that enforce the same rules and configurations across all platforms can reduce security drift.

A centralised monitoring tool that works across both on-premises and cloud systems can help bridge visibility gaps. Visibility gaps in hybrid cloud environments are the top security issue, making it difficult to gain a comprehensive view of the entire system.

A multi-cloud strategy may leave data traveling between connected systems vulnerable to interception and information leaks. Negligence contributes to 98% of breaches, and 98.6% of organisations have misconfiguration issues that risk their data and infrastructure.

Companies should invest in ongoing training programs and build cross-functional teams to address the skills gap. Tools like Cloud Security Posture Management can automatically detect and remediate misconfigurations.

Technology often evolves faster than people can adapt, leading to a skills gap in cloud security. 50% of companies rely on public cloud providers for business records, but their built-in security measures don't automatically integrate with local servers, widening the attack surface.

Encourage employees to earn industry certifications and keep skills up to date through regular upskilling. AI-powered security information and event management platforms can enhance defenses by gathering data from multiple sources.

Role-based access controls ensure that users can only retrieve what they need and nothing more. Security professionals must be well-versed in both on-premises systems and cloud architecture.

Hybrid clouds often have too many access doors but not enough locks to secure them. Data classification tools help you set rules about where sensitive information can be stored or shared. Regular audits with tools that support data residency controls help you stay compliant with important regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.

By adopting these practices, businesses can build a robust and secure hybrid cloud infrastructure that supports their evolving needs while minimising the risks associated with such complex environments.

To ensure a robust security strategy in a hybrid cloud setup, businesses should deploy encrypted network connections like VPNs, dedicated network links, and high-speed WANs for secure, low-latency, and redundant connections.
Automation tools that continuously audit and enforce compliance with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS can help businesses stay compliant, addressing the compliance and governance challenges in their hybrid cloud environments.
Implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO) can enhance security, reduce errors, and simplify the login process, minimizing the risk of accidentally granting public access to sensitive data.
Addressing the cloud skills gap through partnerships, training programs, certifications, and regular upskilling can help businesses ensure that their security professionals are well-versed in both on-premises systems and cloud architecture.
To strengthen identity and access management (IAM), businesses should tie permissions to users, enforce MFA, regularly audit permissions, use IAM tools to manage authentication and access revocation, and classify data using data classification tools. This helps prevent unauthorized access while ensuring that users can only retrieve what they need and nothing more.