How to secure your private cloud

1. Problem

Before finding out what solutions are suitable for your company to deal with issues of cloud security, you need to learn about the problem causing the lack of security at first.

First and foremost, virtualization technology has been promoting the development in modern data centers nowadays, which then leads to architectures which are often a combination of both traditional and private cloud computing environments.

When it comes to the definition, private cloud requires you to control the whole virtualization infrastructure on your own from the componentry to the applications. Even though the pluses of private cloud are numerous and very important to pay attention into, the challenges are also significant with regards to security. No matter where your data is stored, regardless of in a private or a hybrid cloud, it is always the goal of illegal attackers.

A private cloud can help you storage your data in a fixed environment in which applications operate on dedicated servers which are automatic. Furthermore, here the computing resources are also available for you to assist app workloads which can easily approach from any location, at any time and by any device. Nevertheless, cloud security has always been a challenge when you decide to take advantage of this new cloud computing environment. Here are some of the principles which you can base on to decide whether to choose cloud computing or not.

First of all, cloud computing is not able to alleviate the security risks of your current network. You should know that the security danger that your network has to deal with does not change even when you move all your data to the cloud. Even in some cases, those risks related to security will get more and more serious because of the apps on a single server premise which virtualization activates. Moreover, a lot of data center applications take advantage of a lot of types of ports which then make traditional security unhelpful. Another problem occurred here is that cybercriminals will make use of a wide variety of vectors to compromise your data and then they will play hide and seek with you in plain sight to finish their mission.

Another problem here is that cloud security demands on both separation and segmentation and the cloud depends much on shared resources. Security can only be reached its peak when applications and data could be separated on the network into different secure segments. Inside your cloud computing environment, direct interaction among virtual machines in a server could make segmentation a challenging task.

2. Solution

After having a general knowledge of what the problems may be, you need to find out useful solutions to different cases. The first solution mentioned here is to apply new security methods to virtualized environments. Thanks to this, you are able to analyze all the transfer within a single pass and then you will know the app identity, the content inside it as well as the user details. This analysis will then be take advantage to be integral components of your security policy. As a result, the level of security will be improved much.

The second method is to block lateral movement of cyber threats. Nowadays, cyber threats are able to compromise your personal working server and then they will deliver throughout your network to find their desired target, which then puts your network at risk of being attacked. In this case, you should exert control by using principles named Zero Trust so that you will be able to alleviate the threat of being attacked while still being able to block both known and unknown risks.