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If we are honest with ourselves, the “good old days” of IT security weren’t actually that good. But if one thing is for sure, they were certainly a whole lot simpler. You had your servers (usually on-site), you had firewalls set up, and that meant you had your perimeter that you could focus all your defenses on.
It’s the classic castle and moat strategy. If you were inside the network, you’re trusted. Outside, you’re treated as a potential threat. Easy.
However, when we fast forward to today, that castle wall is useless. What you find in its place instead is a sprawling, decentralized metropolis, with a complex mixture of legacy apps, virtual machines, cloud containers, and SaaS applications handling all kinds of sensitive data.
This is the hybrid cloud reality. On the one hand, it gives businesses a massive amount of flexibility, agility, and scalability. The kind that companies of the past could only have dreamed of. But on the other hand, it gives security teams a big headache to deal with, since a whole new world of potential vulnerabilities has been opened up.
How exactly are you supposed to secure an infrastructure that lives everywhere and nowhere at the same time? If you’re feeling overwhelmed at this point, you’re not on your own. In this guide, we will show you that with the right approach, you can build a setup that’s safer, easier to run, and ready for whatever your team needs next.
What Hybrid Cloud Security Really Means
Before we get into some of the best practices, let’s quickly clear up one important thing. Hybrid cloud security is not a single tool or product that you can plug-and-play in your organization. It’s a strategy.
In most cases, a hybrid setup usually connects one or more public cloud platforms, all of your on-premises infrastructure, and any other services (such as apps) that you can run across both.
With this type of setup, security becomes more about how you can best protect your data as it moves between these different locations. It’s a task that’s much easier said than done.
To have a truly comprehensive hybrid security strategy, you need to cover things like identity and access controls, data protection, workload isolation, continuous monitoring, and incident response plans. If all of these things sound familiar, it’s because none of them are particularly new or revolutionary concepts.
The difference with cloud hybrid setups is that they bring together a bunch of complex moving parts, and that means there’s a significantly heightened chance of something slipping through the net.
Why Hybrid Cloud Security Matters More Than Ever
When IT stacks were all built in one location, you could protect them with one mighty firewall. Today’s systems don’t really work the same way.
If compliance is essential to you, maybe you should adopt a sensible strategy and store all your sensitive and high-risk data on-prem so you’re sitting pretty when an audit comes along. Yet your devs still run their workloads on AWS or Azure, your finance teams use a couple of different SaaS platforms, and marketing signs up for a few new AI-powered tools every quarter.
This is by no means an uncommon setup. But the result is a collage of tools and locations, which means companies are juggling many more endpoints, identity risks, confusion over who owns which part of security, and a higher chance of valuable credentials floating around in the ether.
And from a hacker’s standpoint, they don’t really care where your data lives. They just follow the most straightforward path and keep poking and prodding until they find a weakness.
What A Strong Hybrid Cloud Security Strategy Looks Like
Now that we have set the stage, let’s run through some of the core pillars of a valuable and effective hybrid security strategy.
Identity And Access Controls
Identity is the new perimeter in this cloud-first world. Instead of firewalls keeping malicious threats out, the safest way to protect your network and its data is to ensure that only the right people can access it at the right time.
Some ways this is done include using single sign-on (SSO), so your team isn’t juggling 12 passwords, enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA) wherever possible, and applying least-privilege access. Hence, people only see what they need, and permissions are regularly rotated and reviewed.
Protecting Data Across Every Environment
When you’re using a hybrid setup, your data is bound to move around a lot. Because of this, you need to keep it secure when it is in three key states:
- In transit: Encrypt everything that travels between cloud and on-prem.
- At rest: Use strong encryption for storage, backups, and databases.
- In use: Add safeguards like tokenisation or masking for sensitive fields.
The goal here is to ensure that if anyone manages to intercept your data, they can’t read it.
Workload Isolation And Segmentation
This is one of the parts that teams skip, simply because it requires a bit of legwork and organization to set it up. The objective here is to break workloads into small enough units so that, if a breach occurs, it doesn’t become a full-blown crisis.
Segmentation allows you to keep critical workloads in one lane, testing environments in another, and external-facing systems somewhere else entirely. That way, if one area gets compromised, the attacker can’t wander into your core systems unnoticed.
Think of it as keeping your valuables in a safe rather than leaving them on the kitchen counter.
A Clear Incident Response Plan
There is no bulletproof cybersecurity strategy. Hybrid setups can be immensely complex, and sometimes, you may not have the capacity to plug every hole. Because of this, you need to be ready for when things do go wrong and someone manages to breach your systems.
Instead of everyone panicking, you need clear guidelines and policies for:
- Who gets notified first
- Which systems must be isolated immediately
- How to communicate with the broader company
- What evidence must be collected
- How recovery should happen
Hybrid cloud breaches can happen in the blink of an eye, and your team needs to be well-drilled and ready to react if an incident occurs.
Final Word
Securing a hybrid cloud stack can feel like you’re taking on a mammoth task. And in some cases, you’d be right. Hybrid setups can be very complex, and they force you to unlearn decades of perimeter-based" habits that have kept your company safe for so long.
But the principles are relatively simple. You’re moving from static defenses, such as firewalls, to dynamic defenses, such as identity and encryption.
You don’t need to figure it all out in one day. Just start small and don’t bite off more than you can chew. Get your identity checks in order, then get more visibility into what data you actually have, and who should be accessing it (and when). Do these things, and you’re already well ahead of the pack.
