Intelligent Data Centres Issue 05 | Page 30

EDITOR’S QUESTION centres or co-lo, with public/private cloud and often SaaS. This diverse model can often offer the best of all worlds by accommodating different business stakeholders from agile developers to the keepers of highly tuned legacy applications that don’t play nicely in a public cloud. Other elements such as security are also evolving to serve this hybrid IT position. One of the most critical changes is the emergence of a zero trust security model. In simple terms, zero trust does away with the assumption that all access from within the corporate network is trusted and instead verifies everything. This shift makes multi-cloud access management critical and modern enterprises are deploying secure access technologies such as single sign on (SSO) and software defined perimeter (SDP) to simplify the process. SCOTT GORDON, (CISSP) CMO, PULSE SECURE D Data centres must up security to ride the hybrid wave In Q318, for the first time, quarterly vendor revenues from IT infrastructure product sales into cloud environments surpassed revenues from sales into traditional IT environments. According to IDC, 50.9% of the total worldwide IT infrastructure vendor revenues were derived from cloud. Even with the popularity of private, public and hybrid cloud, the benefits of having dedicated data centre capacity is still critical to an overwhelming number of enterprises. Performance, data sovereignty, resiliency and exacting regulatory requirements all feed into a need to maintain racks in strategically important data centres. At least for the short term, even those with cloud-first business models are not 30 Issue 05 SDP aids this by separating the control plane of user authentication and access with the data plane connecting users and applications. necessarily cloud exclusive. The current position for many organisations is a hybrid mode which mixes on-premise, which could be considered as their own data AT LEAST FOR THE SHORT TERM, EVEN THOSE WITH CLOUD- FIRST BUSINESS MODELS ARE NOT NECESSARILY CLOUD EXCLUSIVE. Although not a new concept, it has only been within the last few years that it has started to rise in popularity with analyst firms predicting strong 35% CACG over the next five years – in part fuelled by the needs of hybrid IT. Integrating security controls that span on- premise and cloud is also a major trend. This has led to deeper support for open standards for exchanging authentication and authorisation data between parties. Standards such as Security Assertion Mark-up Language (SAML) and OAuth (Open Authorisation) have gained more traction over the last few years and will become increasingly critical for delivering a zero trust future. Data centres and cloud providers need to be aware of this shift and be able to support this switch towards zero trust to remain a valuable part of a hybrid IT ecosystem that looks to be with us for the foreseeable future. www.intelligentdatacentres.com