For most of us in enterprise IT, the problem has never been about developing an effective hybrid cloud security strategy — it’s been about thwarting the existing security problems and those that may come with a hybrid cloud transition.

That’s why one of the top challenges for business leaders is security’s visibility into the cloud, according to the Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report 2019.

So with the arrival of Google Anthos, many decision-makers are asking themselves: how can Anthos help? Let’s look at three common hybrid cloud security challenges and how to resolve them through Anthos.

1. Compliance and Governance

Hybrid cloud is a powerful solution for businesses in highly regulated sectors like enterprise healthcare, finance, banking, and insurance. That’s also true of containerization and microservice architectures where microservice pros and cons carry weight.

From a pure cost-effectiveness and business processing standpoint, hybrid cloud isn’t just an option for many businesses, it’s becoming more of a necessity as organizations seek to gain a competitive edge over their counterparts. With that being said, IT leaders in security-focused and compliance-heavy verticals have struggled to understand how hybrid cloud can address their incumbent compliance and governance challenges.

For example, it’s nearly impossible to manually manage security and governance in a constantly evolving hybrid cloud environment. There’s too high a chance of errors, and you can’t track changes or replicate processes. This makes it even harder to meet regulatory security baselines for security and compliance auditing.

How Anthos Helps: With Google Anthos in place, you can use open-source tools to automate the scanning and remediation of security controls. This paves the way for greater visibility and repeatability, which means you won’t have to struggle to stay compliant across containers, microservices, individual systems, and the entire hybrid cloud infrastructure.

2. Visibility and Control

What’s the challenge at the heart of a hybrid environment with multiple Kubernetes clusters? Lack of visibility and control. The more your environment changes, the more complex it is to clearly and quickly:

• See what is happening across and within the environment
• Control the environment
• Secure the environment on a distributed systems level at the heart of your infrastructure

Whether it’s on-prem or across cloud environments, it’s a constant rabbit chase to manually monitor for security and compliance.

As you work to keep up with everything from changing DevOps needs to application cloud ops, it’s common to make configuration changes. Management tools must have a high degree of automation that can look at infrastructure and security as code.

How Anthos Helps: The solution is automation. Google Anthos enables the level of automation you need to manage the configuration makeup of all your Kubernetes clusters. This reduces configuration management challenges through greater visibility and control.

3. Weak Security Management

Your enterprise hybrid cloud strategy is like a living organism. Its health can break down as it grows, changes, and evolves. Cloud security protocols must work across private and public clouds, both on-prem and off-prem. They also must deal with data at rest and in transit, which demands comprehensive (yet granular) security management. You’ll need to have authentication, identity management, and authorization procedures in place for both locations.

How Anthos Helps: Anthos is a platform that gives you a single pane of glass for resources and services configuration. This ranges from cloud storage to identity and access management. It makes the latter management aspects possible through one central location for resource configuration using a Kubernetes add-on known as Config Connector.

We’re just at the beginning stages of discovering the numerous enterprise hybrid cloud security challenges that Anthos can help solve. The bottom line, for now, is that the Anthos platform can help you ditch error-prone manual processes for deploying security policies across siloed environments.

Anthos and GKE integration along with Anthos Config Management hold crucial keys to:

• Out-of-the-box compliance enforcement
• End-state cluster visibility
• Ongoing monitoring for security policy adherence

In other words, Anthos makes it possible to govern your complete infrastructure holistically.

We’re beginning to see how GKE and Anthos are changing cloud by offering consistency, flexibility, security, and adaptability across various environments. While there’s certainly risk involved in hosting, running, and managing workloads in a hybrid cloud environment, Anthos is helping organizations like yours rise to the challenge.

Interested in learning more about more about Hybrid Cloud and its other powerful business applications? Consult with us today!