Cloud

Introduction:

Cloud security consists of a set of policies, procedures and technologies that work together to protect cloud-based systems, data and infrastructure. The public cloud has undoubtedly unleashed a paragon of possibilities enabling unparalleled speed and agility in deploying resources. All the while increasing the efficiency of use and the ability to adjust resource usage according to demand.

In 2018 it was estimated that 96% of organisations were using Cloud technologies to deliver business critical applications and services using a mixture of the below public cloud offerings:

IaaS – Infrastructure-as-a-Service

IaaS is where a customer runs typical infrastructure such as virtual machines, storage, database servers, load balancers, web servers amongst others within a Cloud Service Provider’s (CSP) environment rather than on the customer’s own equipment. Traditionally, deployment processes that would have taken weeks to approve, purchase, deliver and deploy can now be up and running in minutes. They can also be automatically scaled up or down to meet demand.

Type of User: In this space are organisations who would normally have hosted their own infrastructure (Web servers, application servers and database servers) in a datacentre.

SaaS – Software-as-a-Service

Here, a specific type of application for example Email services is offered as a service. The provider takes care of all the Infrastructure and associated maintenance of the software service. A very popular form of this model is Microsoft’s Office 365 application suite.

Type of User: This space is where you have various end-user organisations. It will also be where you are likely to find the highest adoption rate as it is basically a turn-key operation type move to the cloud.

This has opened up unique challenges. These include:

• Loss of control and visibility
• Unpredictable performance
• Managing spend
• Shadow IT
• Security
• Compliance

Nuvias approaches these challenges by following a Secure, Accelerate, Monitor approach:

Secure

Using Cloud native security to provide full visibility of assets and security configurations across Clouds and accounts, automate compliance assessment and reporting and provide configuration management allows organisations to effectively secure their cloud environments.

Accelerate

Application acceleration enables an increase in performance and user experience while ensuring the network doesn’t become a performance bottleneck.

Monitor

When moving to Cloud based delivery models traditional approaches to performance monitoring have become ineffective. Nuvias’s approach to monitoring Cloud performance is to focus on end user experience. By baselining and monitoring user experience and performance of Cloud applications organisations can track performance issues and speed problem resolution.