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