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10 Things You Need to Know About Hybrid IT Strategies

Shantha Kumari

The Hybrid IT Infrastructure – bringing together on-premises and cloud capabilities—is a strategy many enterprises are embracing in order to maximize the flexibility and performance they need from their IT operations. Sysfore offers the requisite cloud expertise in handling your Hybrid cloud infrastructure, on both Amazon and Azure Cloud.

Find the Right Hybrid Cloud Balance – Call us or mail our Hybrid IT Specialists to know more!

Here are ten things to think about as you consider a hybrid strategy for your organization.

1. Hybrid Cloud—The Time is Now:

Hybrid cloud

By 2017, the research firm Gartner predicts that half of mainstream enterprises will have a hybrid infrastructure. Businesses are adopting the hybrid approach, to maximize the benefits that both the cloud and physical infrastructure have to offer: the control and easy access of an on premises/private cloud solution with the convenience, scalability, performance, cost, mobility, and collaboration benefits of a solution managed by a public, multi tenant cloud provider such as Azure or Amazon.

2. Taking ‘Shadow IT’ Out of the Shadows:

Today, more and more enterprises are seeing their employees supplementing their traditional reliance on internal IT resources by taking advantage of public cloud services. Enterprise IT departments typically see this as a troubling trend that raises important issues of security and control. But it’s also a chance for the IT to position itself as an internal service provider.

3. Right Resource for the Right Workload:

A hybrid approach gives you the option of scaling resources for each workload and choosing the best application for the job. Applications can run on whichever platform is best suited for that workload: a highly dynamic app with unknown spikes may be best supported in the public cloud while a performance-intensive application may be better off in a private cloud. Data can be located where regulatory or security requirements dictate.

4. Varying Levels of Hybrid Sophistication:

A hybrid approach can have different levels of sophistication: deep integration between cloud and private/ on-premise environments or more simplistic, static, point-to-point connections designed to serve a particular functional need.

5. ROI and Agility:

Any enterprise that has virtualized IT components within its four walls has essentially created its own internal private cloud and has achieved significant reductions in capital and operational expenses. A hybrid cloud extends this strategy with the appropriate investment in metrics, self-service software, automation features and other capabilities. It is a way to achieve significant advances in enterprise agility.

6. Start Small:

Gartner recommends starting a hybrid project with a small pilot, getting comfortable with the ins and outs of the hybrid model, then rolling it out further across the organization. Keep scalability in mind right from the start. While the pilot project may be small in scope, the infrastructure deployed should be ready for growth and capable of delivering an ROI within a defined time frame.

7. Test and Run:

A popular use case for a hybrid strategy involves developing and testing new applications in the cloud and then moving them back into the on-premises or private production environment. You can leverage the cloud environment for fast, on-demand prototype of the new applications and services which are then rapidly deployed and measured for success. Once the applications are ready, the cloud-based development environment can be ratcheted back.

8. Management:

The success of any hybrid approach is going to rest to a great degree on the infrastructure management that is put in place: control of both the public cloud and private assets from a single administrative console using a unified set of security, user, and application policies.

9. Look at Your Network:

A hybrid strategy requires a close look at your enterprise network for bandwidth and scalability. With a hybrid strategy, companies will be relying on their network to ship large amounts of data back and forth, putting far more demand on the network than previously.

10. Culture shift:

Some of the biggest challenges in moving to a hybrid infrastructure are less about the technology and more about management. Most IT departments have a culture centered around control and technical expertise and now have to accommodate a more collaborative, service-oriented approach for the provision of automated, self-service IT capabilities via the cloud.

Sysfore can help you build, secure, and seamlessly scale in the Hybrid Cloud Environment. You contact us at  info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-4110-5555 to understand the hybrid IT cloud better.

Nothing Cloudy About The Identity Access Management (IAM) future!

Shantha Kumari

The future of the Cloud Identity Management (IAM) is shiny & bright, with both SMBs and enterprise businesses pouring in money to protect their data and digital assets.

A new report by Allied Market Research projects that the global cloud IAM market would garner revenue of $2.8 billion by 2020, registering a CAGR of 26.2% during the forecast period 2015 – 2020.

Join in this Cloud evolution with Sysfore and secure your business!

Cloud IAM

Varied technological environments, increasing cyber-attacks, strict regulatory compliances, and increasing digital identities across organizations, are propelling the need of IAM services for information security. With this high stake involved, it’s natural for businesses to look towards the cloud to manage their digital identities, both inside and outside an enterprise.

Traditional concepts for Identity and Access Management that have been focused on the internal IT are no longer sufficient. We still need some of these, but they cover only a fraction of the future scope – and for some organizations already today’s scope – of Identity and Access Management.

The following measures for future Identity and Access Management might help organizations shape their own strategy and roadmap for Identity and Access Management.

#1: More than humans – It’s about Identities of things, devices, services, and apps

In this connected world, everything has an identity – whether it is something like a smart meter, one of the various connected elements in connected vehicles, or wearable tech. All of them require access to be managed through apps, services, devices, etc.

The numerous identities has changed the way in which they are accessed and interfaced with other humans, things, devices, services and apps. It requires authentication and management of relationships between identities.

#2: Multiple Identity Providers – Varied options

There is no central directory anymore, neither for humans nor for all the other things and services. It’s impossible to manage millions of customers spread across the world. Plus, the customers want to re-use identities across apps, services and companies encouraging the BYOI (Bring Your Own Identity) concept.

#3: Multiple Attribute Providers – Information on identities

The Identity and Access Management, will now be the source of information for Cloud, Mobile, and Social Computing, OT (Operational Technology) security, APIs (through which the apps, services and systems interact with each other through and which need to be protected) and the apps, and the Internet of Things. There will be many sources of trust for various attributes.

#4: Multiple Identities – Many users with different identities and flexibly to switch

A single user may have multiple identities within a same organization. He could be an employee, a freelance contractor, and a customer of the same corporation all at the same time. Organizations have to understand that it is still the same person, when he switches from one account to another.

#5: Multiple Authenticators – There is no single authenticator that works for all

There are so many different types of identities and related elements, that it’s not feasible for a single method of authentication which will guarantee security of your identity. There is no single approach that we can rely on. IAM will have to support different authentication mechanisms such as Risk Based Authentication, biometrics, single sign on etc, while understanding the risk and making risk-aware access decisions.

#6: Context – Identity and Access Risk varies in context

A key concept of Future Identity and Access Management is context. Which device is someone using? Which type of authentication? Where is the device used? There are many elements that make up the context. Depending on that context, risk varies. Identity and Access Management has to become risk-based and, with the ever-changing context, dynamic. While today’s static access controls implicitly reflect a risk understanding in a static context, future access controls and decisions must become dynamic to adapt to the current context.

Keeping these fundamental measures in mind, Sysfore can help you build a secure, and protected cloud environment for your business. You contact us at  info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-4110-5555 to know more.

Managing Cloud Identities in Hybrid Cloud

Shantha Kumari

As companies add more cloud services to their IT environments, the process of managing identities is getting more complex . When companies use cloud services — services they don’t control themselves — they still must develop sound policies around role-based access. They still must grant rights to users who need information to get work done, and they must be able to automatically take away those privileges when people leave a company or change roles. On top of it all, companies using cloud services are also bound by any compliance rules that govern their identity and access management (IAM) initiatives.

Businesses now have to deal with a collection of cloud services, that hold sensitive data obtained from new logins and proprietary connector APIs that often don’t work well with internal IAM systems.

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