2023: the evolution of hybrid cloud and a rethinking of the security architecture
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- Published: Wednesday, 23 November 2022 09:19
Kelly Ahuja, CEO at Versa Networks, considers how organizational use of hybrid cloud is likely to develop in 2023; how changing workforce practices will continue to impact organizational architectures; and the rise of automation...
Hybrid cloud
Digital transformation has resulted in ‘The Great Migration of Applications to Cloud’. I anticipate that enterprises will move from an application in a particular cloud (resulting in a multi-cloud deployment) to an application across multiple clouds. With software innovations, enterprises will be able to parse the application into components and choose which function they place where across their footprint – at the edge, private cloud/data center or one of the public clouds. This will be made possible with security and networking solutions that will span these hybrid cloud environments.
Hybrid workforce
The pandemic resulted in enterprises embracing the need and offering flexibility for the workforce to work remotely. Today, many businesses have begun to have employees return to the office, but due to the great resignation and the need for retention, the work environment will be hybrid. Even with the employees back in the office, there will be a sharp change in the way we work – relying heavily on collaboration tools even within the workplace. This will impact the traffic profiles within the enterprise and potentially impact the architecture and/or capacity of the existing infrastructure as it was designed for a different traffic profile.
Protect everything everywhere
The traditional security architecture has worked well for enterprises who have built a walled-garden and centralised access to the Internet. Cloud adoption and the increase in remote work has extended the enterprise perimeter expanding the attack surface. The continued shift to hybrid cloud extends this attack surface further. But the hybrid workforce and the expansion of IoT extends this attack surface from outside the perimeter to inside the perimeter. As the traditional enterprise perimeter dissolves, protecting users, devices, data and connecting this hybrid workforce/devices to applications in hybrid cloud will drive a rethinking of the security architecture.
Shift to platforms
The evolutionary approach to addressing business needs has resulted in tens of point products in an enterprise IT infrastructure; causing complexity that affects the IT agility and driving up the cost of operations. Gone will be the days of function-specific products built for a specific place in the enterprise that has resulted in bespoke islands of identity, policy, authentication, and connectivity. CIOs and CISOs will move to platforms that are extensible across multiple use cases to converge the number of solutions and reduce the overall lifecycle management cost and complexity.
AI and ML for automation
The previous approaches of reacting to threats or outages manually or with scripts have long affected our ability to move quickly and minimise impact to business. With the tremendous innovation in machine learning and artificial intelligence, there will be approaches that allow IT to be more agile and reduce their ‘mean time to innocence’ (MTTI – a concept used by IT teams to show that their area of responsibility is not the source of an issue). Leveraging the right platforms and solutions, enterprises will be able to stay abreast of the threat landscape and protect themselves from bad actors and build infrastructure that will adapt to the changing conditions.
