The agility for a competitive advantage is primary benefit of a hybrid cloud

Arindam Singha Roy, Head Information Technology, EIUL  

“Modern-age businesses with inadequate cloud infrastructure are hustling to ensure their business stability and continuity. Had there been no cloud, business continuity would have been under jeopardy. The Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing and digital transformation have helped the industry to stay afloat with enabling technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Industrial Internet of Things, Digital Twin, Blockchain, etc., along with the cloud. Every machine, equipment, plant, factory, or supply chain transaction that is connected to the cloud is capable of giving employees secured and remote access to process essential data which has greatly helped the industry. Cloud has empowered the manufacturing industry by making the processes and every successive stage more productive, cost effective, collaborated, and streamlined. 

Disrupting the lives of millions of people across the globe, the cloud has provided a cushion to industries against adherence to security compliances, made it easier to adapt to operational workflow transformation, ensured seamless employee-client collaboration, and helped embrace a new workplace reality. It improves the BCP and depreciates the impact of the incidents to the business. SaaS offers advantages over traditional computing. Better Network and Information Security Management. Disaster Recovery – Backup Management and Geographic Redundancy - gives better Recovery Point Objective (RPO). It decreases the Recovery Time Objective (RTO), Increased Availability. DoS Attack Depreciation.

Hybrid cloud refers to a mixed computing, storage, and services environment made up of on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and a public cloud with orchestration among the various platforms. The primary benefit of a hybrid cloud is agility for a competitive advantage. The hybrid approach allows applications and components to interoperate across boundaries, between cloud instances, and even between architectures. 

In the view of the multiple security breaches occurring, securing the hybrid cloud as a shared responsibility with the best practices for securing the cloud should be; employ the principle of least privilege. Choose the right cloud security solution. Create a business continuity and disaster recovery plan. Secure all endpoints in the network. Encrypt data passing through the cloud. And last but not the least, Isolate the most critical infrastructure.”