From the mile-high view, securing cloud workloads is improving, and these three approaches provide a taste of how the cloud security solutions are unfolding. Each approach has its limitations, but by the same token, cloud subscribers are not homogeneous in what they need. For example, will an enterprise subscribe to the cloud services of multiple providers or consolidate on a favorite? Stratecast believes it will be a mix -- using multiple providers for SaaS applications and a favorite provider for Infrastructure as a Service.
For SaaS, several vendors have market-tested premises-based appliances and/or cloud-delivered services that address a glaring concern -- uniform identity and access management when using multiprovider SaaS. Notable vendors in this realm include: CA Technologies, Okta, Ping Identity, SecureAuth, Symplified and TriCipher (part of VMware).
Embedding security into vendors’ IaaS offerings -- the approach being pursued by Savvis and several of its competitors -- is both prudent and consistent with how IT organizations operate in their private data centers.
We recommend that IaaS providers continue down the path of mirroring private data center attributes into their IaaS offerings and make it seamless, allowing IT personnel to administer all of their private and public workloads from a single interface.
Michael Suby is the vice president of research at Stratecast, a division of Frost & Sullivan
This article originally appeared on SearchTelecom.com