Understanding Hybrid Cloud Security: Key Challenges and Best Practices

Hybrid cloud has become a popular choice for many organizations, with 38% of IT decision-makers planning to adopt this mixed computing environment over the next two years. Through hybrid cloud adoption, you can enjoy the best of both worlds, leveraging the greater flexibility and scalability of the public cloud and added security controls and compliance support on on-premises environments.

However, hybrid cloud can also open organizations up to new security challenges, which we will address in this article, alongside some best practices to face these challenges.

What Is Hybrid Cloud Security?

Hybrid cloud security is concerned with the technologies, practices, and policies protecting infrastructure, data, and applications in an environment that blends public cloud with private infrastructure. Security is important in any IT infrastructure, but hybrid cloud presents unique challenges because of how the environments are connected and configured. 

What Are the Key Security Challenges in Hybrid Cloud Environments?

Because of their composition, hybrid environments can introduce new complexities and, therefore, additional security challenges. Combining on-premises infrastructure with one or more public cloud platforms can increase the attack surface and lead to inconsistent security policies, divisions in security responsibilities, compliance issues, limited visibility, and more.

Inconsistent Security Policies

Operating from multiple environments can make it more difficult to maintain consistent security policies. Some rules and norms established in on-premises data centers may not translate to security services, tools, and operational models used by public cloud providers. 

The differences in measures such as firewall rules, data encryption standards, and intrusion detection systems can create vulnerabilities and gaps in hybrid cloud environments, worsening an organization’s security posture and leaving them more vulnerable to attacks.

Shared Security Responsibility

For organizations to mount more effective protective measures against incoming attacks, it’s important to understand the division of security across different environments.

Public cloud service providers are generally responsible for the security of the cloud, which can include physical security, infrastructure, and hypervisor for virtual machines. Add-on services may extend their responsibility to managing security solutions like web application firewalls (WAF) and intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS). Customers are typically responsible for what happens in the cloud, such as network configurations, applications, data, and operating systems.

With private infrastructure, organizations may get complete control over their security operations. However, this also means bearing full responsibility for managing and securing the entire environment, from physical hardware to software configurations, leaving more room for human error. Many companies with private infrastructure opt for a hosted and managed environment, which passes some of the security responsibility to a managed services provider.

When workloads move across environments, it can be hard to distinguish which parties are responsible for security. This is why internal documentation and comprehensive agreements are so important.

Data Privacy and Compliance

Hybrid cloud environments often span multiple regions and platforms, which can create complexity around data privacy, sovereignty, and regulatory compliance. 

Organizations may need to meet requirements such as GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI DSS, while also adhering to state or regional data sovereignty laws. These obligations apply consistently across private and public infrastructure, but they can be more challenging to enforce when workloads are distributed.

The biggest hurdle is ensuring that policies are applied uniformly across environments. Encryption, logging, and audit controls must be consistently implemented to prove compliance and protect sensitive data, whether it is stored in a private data center, a public cloud, or moving between them.

By treating compliance as a shared responsibility and ensuring that governance frameworks extend across the entire hybrid environment, businesses can reduce gaps, demonstrate adherence to regulations, and minimize risk exposure.

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Just as compliance measures can be implemented inconsistently, identity and access management (IAM) can also be difficult to manage and carry out consistently. When authentication methods, such as single sign-on (SSO), are not aligned across cloud and on-premises systems, the level of security may vary across your infrastructure. Without the principle of least privilege and equally strong access controls in place, organizations can fall victim to cyber threats due to unauthorized access from outside infiltrators or malicious insiders.

Data Visibility and Control

Organizations have to be able to manage and monitor data to identify security threats and ensure that cloud security measures are effective. This can prove difficult because data can be commingling across environments or providers. Without holistic visibility and control across all environments, businesses may not be able to effectively monitor, track, and address threats. 

Shadow IT and Misconfiguration Risks

Shadow IT can also pose a significant problem to businesses. This is a term to describe any IT systems, services, or solutions used in a company that have not been approved, and could include anything from cloud storage to SaaS applications and cloud instances. Shadow IT can bypass established security policies and create vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. 

Even when cloud resources are approved, they can be susceptible to attacks through misconfigurations. Misconfigurations can create exposed APIs, issues in network security groups, open databases, and inappropriate access levels for storage buckets.

7 Hybrid Cloud Security Best Practices

The right hybrid security practices don’t just happen. They require a strategic and proactive approach, combining several tactics for a comprehensive view of the hybrid cloud environment. Here are seven best practices you can apply to improve your hybrid cloud security posture.

1. Zero Trust Architecture

Zero Trust Architecture is a security model that abides by the principle of “never trust, always verify.” This model assumes that nothing within the network perimeter is safe, requiring each application, device, and user to verify each time before being granted access to a resource, whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud. 

Some strategies that can work within zero trust architecture include multi-factor authentication (MFA), Just-In-Time (JIT), Just-Enough Access (JEA), and continuous verification:

• Multi-factor authentication: Requires users to use two or more verification factors before gaining access (passwords, authenticator codes, biometric scans, etc.).
• Just-In-Time (JIT) access: Provides permissions only upon request for a short period,
• Just-Enough Access (JEA): The user or application is given the minimum level of permissions to accomplish required tasks.
• Continuous verification: With continuous verification, each access request is continuously authenticated, no matter the source. Verification methods can include device health, behavioral analytics, identity, and location.

2. Centralized Visibility and Management

Having a unified view over the entire hybrid cloud landscape is essential for an effective security strategy and a strong hybrid cloud strategy overall. Without it, teams operate in silos, lack critical information, and can’t respond quickly to threats.

Major cloud providers offer tools to extend visibility and management across hybrid and multicloud environments. These include:

• Azure Arc: Extends Azure’s management and governance plane to any infrastructure, including on-premises, at the edge, or in other clouds. With Arc, you can apply Azure Policy, manage Kubernetes clusters, and centralize logging and monitoring across all environments.
• AWS Systems Manager: Provides a unified interface to manage both AWS resources and on-premises or hybrid workloads. With Systems Manager, teams can automate patching, track compliance, and consolidate operations into a single management console.

With these platforms, organizations can apply more consistent policies, centralize monitoring, and simplify incident response. The result is stronger visibility, faster detection, and greater opportunities for automation across hybrid and multicloud environments.

3. Data Encryption and Protection

Data protection is important for the safety of your end users and your organization. Implementing encryption on data in transit and at rest ensures that data cannot be tampered with or intercepted. Businesses should use strong encryption protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), so that even if data is intercepted, it is unusable. 

Before applying encryption, you may also want to classify your data based on sensitivity and priority. For example, data that is public, confidential, or internal can be classified as such to help organizations understand how to apply the most appropriate protection to the right workloads. Classification can also help businesses meet specific compliance requirements and optimize resources appropriately based on the level of risk different data breaches may pose. 

Data loss prevention (DLP) solutions are also important in preventing sensitive data from leaving an organization. These tools can monitor data movement, identify sensitive and classified information, and enforce policies on how to respond to unauthorized attempts to transfer or access sensitive data. 

4. Network Segmentation

Network segmentation, which may also be referred to as microsegmentation, breaks networks into smaller, isolated segments. Each segment can have its own security policy, and communication can be limited between workloads, which can keep breaches from spreading across an entire cloud environment.

In hybrid cloud infrastructure, this can be achieved through traditional virtual local area networks (VLANs) and subnets to separate data tiers, applications, or departments. Security groups and Network Access Control Lists (NACLs) can be used in public clouds to create rules that serve as virtual firewalls. Segmentation can also be tied to application identity instead of IP addresses, which can create tighter controls between workloads.

5. Automating Security Protocols

While some security measures benefit from manual responses, it’s hard to stay on top of all activities in a hybrid cloud environment. Automating security protocols means that security teams can be alerted in real time about suspicious activity. Tools can continuously scan environments and immediately detect threats, prioritizing and escalating relevant alerts to the security team. Modern automation tools are often equipped with artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms that learn from past behavior, even predicting future hybrid cloud security challenges.

When paired with a Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service, automation can go beyond simply flagging issues. MDR, which combines technology and human expertise, enables rapid investigation, containment, and remediation of threats without adding extra burden to in-house teams.

6. Regular Security Audits

Regular security audits serve to fill in the gaps, uncovering any missed opportunities to adjust security controls and reduce regulatory compliance gaps. It’s hard to plan for every weakness, but regular reviews can find and address vulnerabilities, enforce important policies, and assess an organization’s security posture. This should be part of a continuous improvement process, adapting to changing cloud configurations and evolving threats over time. 

7. Data Recovery Plan

Even with all of the previous best practices in place, organizations can experience a cyberattack, system failure, or natural disaster that results in a loss of data or service disruption. Due to these potential threats, it’s important to have backup and replication strategies in place that meet desired recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPO and RTO).Businesses should understand how much data they can afford to lose and how long they can be down before an outage or data loss significantly impacts critical business operations. Teams need to regularly test their data recovery plans to confirm they will work in a key moment, and all processes and responsibilities should be well-documented. Immutable backups also make for a strong safety net, as they cannot be deleted or altered by anyone for a set period.

Strengthen Your Hybrid Cloud Security with TierPoint

Hybrid cloud environments offer greater control to organizations looking to innovate and scale their systems, but they can also introduce unique and complex threats. The benefits can outweigh the threats, but only if you have a robust security strategy in place. TierPoint can help you and your team feel more prepared, with the right tools to secure your hybrid systems and proactively adapt to the future of cybersecurity.

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