Integrating hybrid cloud has become a cornerstone for the DevOps team in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. With the combination of public, on-premises and private cloud environments, DevOps teams have maximum flexibility, allowing them to deploy applications and microservices across all clouds. Additionally, the hybrid cloud empowers DevOps teams to customize their spending on purchasing additional infrastructure and balances costs and revenue.

However, ensuring security for hybrid cloud remains a critical concern amidst this transformative shift. Adopting effective security measures and technologies helps mitigate the risks associated with hybrid cloud setup and allows the DevOps team to reap maximum benefits. 

Hybrid Cloud Security Challenges

The rapid organizational shift towards hybrid cloud adoption poses significant security challenges for practitioners. ESG conducted a survey and found that 47% of respondents need help in maintaining security within multiple cloud architectures.

Security is a prime concern in a hybrid cloud environment because various endpoints, mobile devices and IoT devices directly access the cloud network, expanding the attack surface. Attackers can target the hybrid network by exploiting the weakest endpoint and launching cyber attacks, resulting in data theft.

The hybrid cloud architecture uses a mix of private, public cloud, and third-party tools and security services. When sensitive data scatters across multiple cloud environments, buckets, and locations, keeping track of where the data resides becomes challenging. All this brings visibility, control, compliance issues, and the emergence of shadow or unmanaged cloud data.

Laminar Labs’ study scanned public cloud storage buckets and found that 21% contained sensitive PII, including email addresses, phone numbers and financial data. Similarly, the Orca research team recently highlighted the rise of malware in cloud storage buckets that can steal user information or change configurations. Organizations take an average of 12 days to remediate malware, while it takes 91 days to fix malware in storage buckets.

Integrating third-party SaaS applications within the hybrid cloud network also increases the risk of software supply chain attacks. Organizations using these services often rely on API keys, credentials and tokens for seamless communication between IT environments. But for instance, if the APIs have any security flaws or the credentials are overly accessible or left unencrypted, attackers can exploit them, gain unauthorized access to critical systems and compromise sensitive data.

Moreover, in a hybrid cloud setup, managing different cloud service providers (CSPs) adds a layer of complexity. Managing different cloud environments requires distinct skills, and mastering multiple public and private cloud architectures is much more challenging. This security knowledge gap exposes enterprises to risks and provides adversaries an easy pathway to infiltrate the cloud architecture.

How to Secure Hybrid Cloud? Emerging Approaches and Technologies

Cloud Security Report 2023 found that 39% of businesses experience data breaches in their cloud environment. Human error is the leading cause of cloud data breaches, possibly because of compromised accounts and misconfigured assets. As security professionals are concerned about effectively managing access and strengthening cloud security posture, they must implement innovative approaches and technologies like:

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

Gartner predicts that by 2026, over 20% of organizations will deploy data security posture management (DSPM) solutions, an emerging technology vital in boosting security in hybrid cloud. DSPM is a set of tools and practices helping organizations analyze, manage, and improve data security within cloud data stores, mainly across multi-cloud environments.

While cloud security posture management (CSPM) focuses on identifying and fixing vulnerabilities within the cloud infrastructure level, DSPM does so at the data level. Similarly, SaaS security posture management (SSPM) assesses the security of SaaS apps and hardens the cloud posture. As more organizations adopt hybrid cloud setups, which expands the issue of data sprawl, they will likely need to adopt DSPM to prevent unauthorized access to the data.

Using DSPM capabilities allows organizations to discover where it stores sensitive data and how it is used. These solutions use machine learning (ML) and natural processing language (NLP) techniques and a data tagging framework to locate and classify data according to its level of sensitivity.

DSPM solutions enable security teams to continuously assess the cloud environment for security misconfigurations and vulnerabilities through various means, including audits, scans, and penetration tests. This increases visibility and control within the hybrid network and helps enterprises reduce the chance of data breaches and security incidents. Besides this, it monitors and enforces data access policies and automatically classifies data to relevant laws and regulations.

Several financial and healthcare companies have adopted DSPM solutions to assess and improve their cloud security posture. However, integrating these tools into the existing ones can be challenging, especially for companies with fragmented IT infrastructure.

These tools can also bring more financial costs and a need for skilled professionals, which not everyone can afford. CISO must look into different vendors and decide according to their budget. Also, providing adequate training or taking professional help can solve the issue of unskilled labor.

Zero-Trust Network Access

Zero-trust network access (ZTNA) is a security approach that focuses on maintaining granular access control, securing connections, enabling secure remote access, and reducing the attack surface without affecting productivity.

A new report reveals that companies adopting this security framework have increased from 24% in 2021 to 61% in 2023. Unlike traditional perimeter-based defenses like Virtual Private Networks(VPNs) or firewalls, ZTNA adopts a more comprehensive approach to strengthening the security posture. At its core, ZTNA believes no one verifies every user and device and authenticates their identity before granting access to the resources.

In a hybrid cloud environment, ZTNA reduces the attack surface by enforcing least privilege access policies, ensuring only authorized users and devices can access the cloud resources. Additionally, by assessing certain contextual factors such as access time, location, user behavior and device security posture, ZTNA assures that only secure and compliant devices connect to the hybrid cloud.

Micro-segmentation is another core element of the zero-trust security framework, which divides the entire network into small isolated segments, each functioning as a separate and secure network. It means having different segments for different applications and workloads with specific access controls in a hybrid cloud environment. It limits the impact if it compromises one segment because it prevents lateral movement across the entire network. This way, micro-segmentation protects against external and internal threats, better manages access control and improves hybrid cloud data security and administration.

Advancement in Generative AI

The advancement in Generative AI is a game changer in preventing hybrid cloud security risks. Unlike traditional security methods, generative AI’s advanced capabilities help in threat detection and remediation and create a dynamic defense mechanism.

Cloud-based AI-powered platforms like Google Cloud Vertex AI, Azure OpenAI Service and Amazon SageMaker emerged as indispensable tools for organizations that aim to leverage the benefits of AI technology. The AI-powered tools can process vast amounts of data, detect anomalies, recognize previously outlawed patterns and reduce the time to identify and contain a breach, which was 291 days in 2023.

Generative AI models help security teams create realistic incident scenarios, allowing professionals to enhance their incident response preparedness. Such capabilities ensure that response teams are well-prepared for threat hunting and incident response efficiently.

Moreover, within the hybrid cloud, where ensuring data privacy and compliance are paramount, Generative AI can create realistic yet synthetic data sets. This approach helps organizations to perform analytics and testing without the risk of exposing sensitive data.

However, Generative AI offers both opportunities and challenges in cybersecurity. While it can significantly improve cloud security, it exposes the environment to more sophisticated and complex cyber-attacks. To address these risks, the CIO and CISO establish policies around the ethical use of generative AI and stay updated on the latest developments surrounding these models.

Additional Hybrid Cloud Security Best Practices

Securing the cloud environment is more challenging when using a hybrid cloud environment. Though it seems intimidating, the good news is that organizations can still take steps.

• Use SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) solutions to manage and monitor user access to SaaS apps and prevent supply chain attacks.
• Perform regular security audits as they help detect potential vulnerabilities and security flaws in the hybrid cloud architecture. It includes assessing risks associated with cloud components like insecure APIs, outdated software, misconfigurations and unlimited access control.
• Raise awareness among employees about potential risks associated with the hybrid cloud. With adequate education, the end user becomes knowledgeable regarding the best data protection practices, reducing the chances of data exposure.
• Back up critical cloud data to protect against malware attacks. Store the data in a secure and isolated location, as keeping them in the same place increases the risk of attackers exploiting it.
• Rotate and encrypt APIs, passwords, and other credentials, as it reduces the risk of unauthorized access and potential data breaches.
• Develop and maintain a robust incident response plan to ensure an effective response to security incidents. A well-prepared response plan minimizes the impact of a breach and fosters a quick recovery process.
• Assess cloud service providers and third-party vendors by evaluating their security certificates, practices and supply chain protocols to overcome compatibility and integration issues.
• Collaborate with industry experts as they provide valuable insight into using the right hybrid cloud security solutions and help CISOs develop effective preventive measures.
• Keep all the systems and cloud applications updated with the latest security patches. Regular and timely updates help minimize vulnerabilities before threat actors exploit them.

Final Words

Hybrid cloud offers numerous opportunities to organizations, such as scalability, greater agility and cost-effectiveness. However, the increasing adoption of hybrid cloud setup raises data security and privacy challenges because of complex and interconnected networks. Understanding the risks associated with the cloud environment and adopting technologies, such as zero-trust network access, DSPM, generative AI and other security measures, helps mitigate the risks and strengthen the cloud posture.