• Thought Leadership

Cloud Complexity and the Need for Tighter Security Grow Together

By Rajesh Deenadayalan

Whether on-premises, private, hybrid or multicloud, or at the edge – working in the cloud is complex. And as the enterprise expands, so too does the threat surface for cyberattacks.

Ransomware, in particular, is among the biggest risks organizations now face and cloud-based data is accounting for 39% of successful attacks. Containerized applications, which have been a boon to both migration and management can also lead to vulnerabilities which has led security to be cited as a top concern for more than half of organizations.

These two datapoints reveal a fact that should not be surprising: the current state of security in cloud and containerization strategy is not nearly as sufficient as you may think.

Saddled with increasingly understaffed IT teams, companies are hungry to avoid risks, mitigate the complexity and protect their digital real estate. Just as the cloud outages of the last couple of years have taught us that reliability and resiliency cannot be an afterthought, neither can security.

That’s our philosophy around the Cloud Security Services which we just announced. The idea is simple: to put security at the front of the cloud modernization conversation. Our goal is to help organizations achieve end-to-end security for all workloads across any cloud environment. This means that regardless of the cloud platform of choice, or the amount of data and application real estate, security can be built into the workloads to provide a fundamental layer of protection.

These new services are delivered through Hitachi Application Reliability Centers (HARC), our cloud and engineering centers of excellence – virtual as well as physical – that provide managed services designed to optimize cloud workloads for reliability, security, and cost. Through HARC, businesses are afforded a holistic approach to modernizing infrastructure, applications, and data together to leverage hybrid multicloud environments and build personalized cloud strategies.

Serving Up Security

The Cloud Security Services leverage industry-leading security expertise to reduce risk, improve overall security and stay compliant. They also feature multilayer security to shield cloud, container, cluster, customer data and code – I like to refer this as the “5 C’s” of designing security for workloads.Through a combination of Defense in Depth, “Security by Design,” Zero Trust, and automation-enabled approaches, we can help protect workloads across different cloud environments by increasing visibility, reducing attack surfaces, and preserving compliance.

If this sounds like a one-size-fits-all approach, it’s not. The truth is that many organizations are at different point of their cloud security journey, and rightfully so. Each company has different business and regulatory compliance requirements, and these are constantly evolving at a pace many IT organizations cannot manage on their own.

In an increasingly digital world, protecting intellectual property and personally identifiable information (PII) is an existential concern. Leveraging thousands of successful cloud migrations, Hitachi Vantara’s services contain the broadest range of regulatory security and compliance controls across industries from financial services to healthcare, and from manufacturing to energy and utilities. Hitachi Vantara can pre-configure cloud workloads to meet HIPAA, NIST, ISO27001/2, SOC2 and more.

That’s why we’re excited about Cloud Security Services, the latest advancement in our HARC strategy. These services are designed specifically to optimize cloud workloads for resiliency, security, cost and always-on business. And through HARC, we help organizations dramatically ease the complexities of cloud by helping migrate, modernize and manage workloads across any cloud platform.

Rajesh Deenadayalan is Director, Cloud Engineering Services, Hitachi Vantara.

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