Connecting The Dots: How To Achieve End-to-End Compliance With Hybrid Clouds

By Dan Timko, President & CTO, Cirrity

For managed services providers (MSPs) and technology resellers, one of the emerging challenges in service delivery is providing end-to-end compliance assurance to customers. End-to-end security has historically been the main focus, with providers finding it too complicated or expensive to build or license platforms that guarantee customers regulatory compliance for mandates such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Those that offered compliant, cloud-based infrastructure and solutions generally had to charge a substantial premium, and not all customers were ready to incur the expense of storing all or even most of their assets in a compliant cloud.

The tides are turning in the compliance world, as new solutions emerge that enable the promised value of hybrid clouds — where one compliant cloud resource can be connected to a variety of cloud-based, on-premises virtual and even on-premises physical resources that may not have the same requirements.

The Hybrid Cloud Finds Its Stride

One of the difficulties preventing hybrid cloud solutions from having this much flexibility has been the need to maintain policy compliance across various hybrid cloud resources. Today, leading technology vendors are developing solutions that better allow customers to manage both compliance and control of resources across multiple clouds.

One example is Cisco’s Intercloud Fabric (ICF), which incorporates an isolated and encrypted tunnel that enables secure communication between private and public clouds. It uses software defined networking (SDN) technology to extend logical networks across multiple cloud sites, while protecting that traffic both in transit and internally within the cloud provider network. This particular example also allows for corporate policy control, not only between the on-premises cloud and external cloud resources, but even within the internal systems of the customers themselves.

Increasingly, organizations have internal controls that specify what assets can be stored in which locations, and by whom. Being able to offer a hybrid on-premises and data-center-based cloud solution that will ensure these controls are honored across the entire platform will be an enormous business builder for MSPs and resellers.

The Benefit Of Choice

These solutions will make it practical for providers to offer a much greater palette of solutions to their customers in a greater array of configurations. Increasingly, MSPs and resellers want to offer as wide a variety of cloud options for their customers as is feasible — a one-stop cloud shop, if you will. Having access to these “cloud connector” technologies will let them do just that.

Providers will be able to contract with numerous cloud providers covering the entire spectrum of cost, configuration, and compliance. They will then be positioned to work with customers in an advisory capacity (another goal of most providers) to help them determine which workloads need what level of protection and craft a unified solution that supports all of them, distributing the workloads across heterogeneous clouds.

Portability is also becoming a selection criterion for many customers, and from what we are seeing, these emerging technologies will satisfy that mandate, as well. Because the technology will interconnect these disperse clouds, workloads and other assets can both communicate and even migrate across all hybrid cloud environments.

Management Takes Precedence

It goes without saying that the more cloud environments a provider or a company conjoins in a hybrid cloud, the more important management becomes. To succeed, it will be important for these connectivity technologies to unite all of the hybrid cloud’s resources under a single management console with centralized visibility across both public and private clouds.

Customers that wish to handle management and administration are able do it themselves. Providers can also offer management of the hybrid cloud footprint as a value-add service, including not only updates, policy and user administration but also shifting space allocations and workload distributions.

A Bright, “Cloudy” Future

With the compliant cloud-connection technologies currently being released or in development, companies and their technology vendors will have full control over which assets are aligned with which cloud environments and at what level of security and compliance. Most importantly, it will be simple and inexpensive to dynamically shift workloads and assets as changing policy or administrative needs dictate.

From the technology provider’s perspective, these solutions will add another layer of security they can tout to their customers. They don’t replace or in any way diminish the provider’s own security efforts. They simply complete the final link in a chain that has been under development for a decade or more—a chain of security, flexibility and portability that will enable companies to place full confidence in the cloud.

Dan Timko is president and CTO of Cirrity, a channel-only, Cisco Powered cloud service provider with locations throughout the continental United States. You can contact Timko at DTimko@cirrity.com. For more information on Cirrity, visit www.cirrity.com.