How to approach data protection in multicloud environments | Federal Information Network

Commercial clouds host and deliver agency applications as well as services from an agency’s own data centers. Both sources often present themselves identically to end users. But system administrators need to make adjustments to ensure that the data protections in place at agency data centers are also in place at their cloud service providers.

This requirement – ​​having equal levels of protection across hybrid and multicloud environments – extends to ensuring that an agency can recover from a cybersecurity breach or other service disruption.

Nick Perez, Chief Technology Officer for the Cloud Practice at ThunderCat Technology, explained it this way: “There is native backup in the cloud. There is cross-regional backup. But the recovery part is the hardest part.

The reason is simple. Each cloud service provider builds services in its own way, he said. The challenge arises because the agencies “have invested in on-site procedures and policies that have evolved over many, many years,” Perez said on the Federal News Network show. Industry Exchange Cloud.

When adding cloud computing, “they now have to adapt and ultimately identify gaps and augment these current solutions differently as they adopt each cloud provider and each software as a service solution.”

Organizations often have misperceptions about the security features of their cloud service providers, added Brad Montgomery, federal pre-sales manager for data protection at Dell Technologies. “The assumption is that once an organization moves an application to the cloud, the cloud platform itself will provide everything it needs from a data protection and resiliency perspective. data. That’s not necessarily true,” he said.

Montgomery cited a common application, Microsoft Exchange, with its extended settings for security and data protection in on-premises instances.

Agencies gain many benefits from moving to the cloud version of Exchange when moving to Microsoft Office 365, “but at the same time, it won’t provide the same level of data protection that you had on-premises with backup and restoration,” Perez said. . “Even if you upgrade to M365 for Exchange, you still need to make sure you have this data protection to meet the service level agreement you agreed to for your on-premises solution.”

Otherwise, this need – to ensure that each cloud provider is configured according to agency security requirements – may prevent authorities from working when a given application is ported to multiple cloud providers.

Embrace Cloud Security

According to Perez and Montgomery, the answer is to adopt specific SaaS backup and recovery tools. These tools are multi-tenant, multi-vendor and intended for specific applications not only within M365 but also within other widely used platforms such as Salesforce.

A significant benefit is how these apps allow IT staff to manage multiple instances of application data protection from a single screen, Perez said. It’s been a holy grail since the inception of cloud computing, he said.

“I have customers who use Amazon and back things up in Azure for continuity,” Perez said.

What’s more, these apps, Montgomery added, enable best practice in data protection. That is, the backup and restore instances do not exist on the same physical infrastructure as the production instance. After all, all commercial clouds experience occasional downtime.

“When talking about multicloud, what is the best practice to protect data? You want to make sure it’s decoupled from the source,” he said. “You don’t want your backups to be on the same array as your production. You don’t want your data protection to be in the same cloud as your production. »

He added, “The cloud is still an integral part of agency modernization efforts, but we are much more specific about how we leverage it. Data protection is a great use case for this.

Both Montgomery and Perez highlighted how the SaaS cloud market is constantly adapting. For example, backup systems are increasingly the target of ransomware attacks, Perez said. He advised looking at least-privilege access tools that feature temporary keys to minimize anyone’s access. These tools support the zero-trust posture that all agencies pursue.

Perez also said cloud data protection technologies are migrating to on-premises data centers. Customers with secret, closed environments without internet access cannot access cloud-hosted SaaS.

“But vendors are now offering peripheral boxes,” he said. “You can ride in racks. They give you your own region. They give you these cloud technologies… in this locked down environment.

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