How Enterprise Cloud Solutions Enhance Security

Working in highly regulated industries such as finance, healthcare or the public sector means adhering to a much stricter set of compliance rules and regulations, as well as ensuring operational continuity. Enterprises in this space who want to leverage the OPEX-based model of cloud infrastructure cannot simply rely on a basic cloud solution. They need an out-of-the-box cloud migration, maintenance, easy deployment and more, all at scale. Limited visibility and difficult management - especially across multiple clouds – make cloud adoption for enterprises much slower.

These simpler cloud services available on the market are mainly suitable for commercial/non-critical applications. To create an enterprise-grade cloud solution, we need a management layer that offers consistent controls over the outsourced infrastructure.

What is Enterprise Cloud?

Enterprise Cloud Solutions are characterised by an infrastructure management layer that provides vendor-agnostic control over multiple types of clouds, namely public, private and multi cloud. Compared to  a bare-bones offering of a cloud service, Enterprise Cloud Solutions help with ensuring compliance and security with features such as disaster recovery, validated back-ups, monitored security, and processing locations.

To assess whether an enterprise cloud solution is suitable for your business needs, we recommend using the following criteria:

Security

An enterprise cloud solution incorporates extensive security modules, ranging from security infrastructure to monitoring and response solutions. For infrastructure, an enterprise cloud solution can leverage firewalls and proxies for protection at layer 4-7. In addition, other security modules can be employed, including:

• Vulnerability Management: a solution which conducts regular scans to identify any configuration issues, outdated software versions, or exposure to new threats. These vulnerabilities can then be mitigated by a team of security experts.

• Security Incident and Event Management: a managed service which collects logs from security infrastructure and end user devices to identify threats and protect against them.

• Workload Protection: typically an antivirus or anti-malware solution installed on a virtual machine to help protect against malicious files.

• Data Encryption: whenever sensitive data is transmitted or stored, the information is encrypted such that malicious actors are not able to understand or use the data.

• Compliance: an enterprise cloud solution ensures that the underlying infrastructure is compliant with industry-standard regulations, such as SOC2, HIPAA, or ISO27001. These types of certifications have specific requirements around secure business operations, including communications security, business continuity, security policies and their enforcement, among others.

Cloud Agnosticism

To help ensure both compliance and cost optimisation, an enterprise cloud solution can enable businesses to seamlessly cloud-shift applications between regions and/or cloud vendors. Automating this functionality ensures lower cloning or rebuild times that lower costs and help deliver time-sensitive projects. When delivering an application to a new geography that has data sovereignty requirements, an enterprise cloud solution can create a clone of the application without risk.

Unified Governance

To ensure that consistent policies are enforced throughout the different cloud infrastructure environments, an enterprise cloud solution provides a single management layer to govern company-wide configurations. For example, in a multi cloud environment, enforcing a role-based access control (RBAC) user management system would require individual configurations for each public cloud provider. A unified governance layer helps enterprises to define a RBAC policy once and cascade it to all the required environments.

End-to-End Infrastructure Management

To tackle the complexity of hybrid and multi cloud environments, an enterprise cloud solution encompasses every cloud environment, including on-premises infrastructure, private cloud and multi cloud using a single point of control for managing infrastructure and applications. Rather than using one management interface for an on-premises deployment, another for private, and a different one for each public cloud, an enterprise cloud solution can service all types of infrastructure from a single pane of glass.

Performance Monitoring

For consistent performance, an enterprise cloud solution requires advanced infrastructure and application monitoring to determine the health of the environment. Proactive performance monitoring enables the operations teams to tackle performance degradations before they become problematic, reduce mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) and perform root cause analysis to determine what part of the infrastructure or application stack impacts the performance. Advanced solutions can intelligently manage application traffic using recovery strategies that ensure app requests are serviced.

Automation and Self-Management

To help with consistent management and operational continuity, an enterprise cloud solution can enable businesses to automate processes such as performing backups, provisioning local, testing and production environments, as well as pushing configuration and policy changes across multiple environments from a single command. 

Who needs Enterprise Cloud Solutions

Enterprise cloud solutions deliver a consistent, high-performance experience suitable for operating mission-critical applications under tough regulations. While a basic cloud solution offers the bare bones for setting up an infrastructure-as-a-service environment, an enterprise cloud solution delivers more advanced functionality. These are typically required for customers with the following characteristics:

Complex Infrastructure

Managing a large and complex cloud infrastructure becomes increasingly difficult with cloud-native tooling. With an enterprise cloud’s management overlay, infrastructure management activities are streamlined. Rather than having the IT team spending time and money on managing disparate cloud and on-premises infrastructure, they can use a single management platform for infrastructure orchestration and focus their time on value-adding activities for the business, such as application development and service delivery.

Lack of Vendor-Specific Skills

Handling multiple cloud vendors requires vendor-specific knowledge. While concepts are similar between providers such as AWS and Azure, each provider has different provisioning and configuration processes, meaning that the skills are not transferable between providers. In the case where an enterprise does not have all the required vendor-specific skills in-house, a unified management layer compensates by offering a vendor-agnostic management console. An enterprise cloud solution shortens the learning curve for managing infrastructure and also prevents vendor lock-in.

Security and Compliance Requirements

In cases where enterprises have specific requirements for security and compliance, an enterprise cloud solution offers a secure service wrap to ensure that policies can be centrally governed and cascaded on to every cloud environment. Manually setting up security and compliance policies across every provider is more susceptible to human error and time consuming.

Divio for Enterprise Cloud Management

Divio’s comprehensive cloud management platform combines all enterprise cloud requirements in one solution. With a single overlay, enterprises have access to a range of tools and features that can help build high-performance, secure, and compliant cloud environments.

Divio offers scheduled and on-demand back-ups to keep data safe, such that you can restore applications to their previous states when needed. 

For security, Divio offers always-on vulnerability scanning and threat analysis solutions that keep your infrastructure and application safe with intelligent update discovery and suggestions for your add-ons. Our fully managed platform’s availability is guaranteed through response times governed by an extensive service level agreement.

To find out more about how you can leverage cloud flexibility with enterprise-grade reliability using Divio's multi cloud management platform and professional services, arrange a demo of our platform, or simply sign up and get started for free.