With cloud services becoming increasingly easy to procure, software developers have flocked to them quickly for a range of reasons. Whether this is to unlock productivity, access on-demand innovation, or accelerate releases, the benefits of shifting to cloud networking are quite clear. After this, developers discovered the additional capabilities of another cloud provider and started using that one, too. This rapidly resulted in:
With this, both security and network teams were left to figure out how to support these environments without significantly increasing risk.
Nearly 90% of organisations have adopted a multicloud strategy, and 96% are moderately to extremely concerned about cloud security, notably:
For security teams, this frequently means managing a different set of security tools for each cloud, creating massive management complexity. They also lack clear visibility, relying on data pieced together from multiple consoles.
Network teams are in a similar situation, trying to connect workloads that developers deployed across clouds without having best practices and architectures in place. Dynamic cloud environments and frequent app updates make it difficult for network teams to keep policies in sync and maintain performance.
The end result of this is leaving security and network teams oftentimes with inconsistent policies that create risk and require significant manual effort to manage.
Seventy-five percent of organisations believe using one platform for both network and security purposes would provide benefits across the board. But perhaps more importantly, that single platform must operate in every environment an organisation uses, from public cloud to the edge to on premises.
Because the network is a primary enforcement mechanism for cybersecurity, unifying network and security tools is a logical outcome. This trend is seeing traction, as more than 80% of IT leaders are consolidating security and networking teams or have a management directive to improve collaboration. This convergence allows security and network teams to work together to address cloud security proactively.
To both secure the complex multicloud environment and connect workloads and applications across them, a new type of solution is required: secure multicloud networking. This provides secure connectivity between cloud environments with a standardised platform and unified console no matter how many clouds are in use. Ideally, it should be able to create network connections between not just clouds but also on-premises and edge sites.
Your developers may also want to take advantage of distributed app architectures, which require connecting microservices hosted in different clouds. App-to-app cloud networking can offer layer 7 connectivity and load balancing, but it should provide application security as well.
With a secure multicloud networking solution, you can:
Network engineers can set up new sites, connections, and policies with just a few clicks. Automation handles the rest, even resolving any IP conflicts between clouds. Developers can deliver and connect apps to multiple environments with service discovery across Kubernetes clusters.
As part of the deployment process, both network and security policies are attached to the application and follow it no matter where it runs. Having a unified multicloud network from end to end means consistent policy enforcement. Across clouds and sites, you can protect applications and APIs against advanced threats, as well as keep unwanted connections out of the network.
Quickly identify network or application performance issues with detailed telemetry. This empowers NetOps, DevOps, and application teams with the insights they need to troubleshoot and optimise applications. Telemetry data should also train machine learning to recognise anomalies, analyse APIs, detect security issues, and more.
Networking across clouds gives you the freedom to move workloads and avoid vendor lock-in. Unlike cloud-native security or network controls, policies managed through secure multicloud networking are attached to the workload and require no changes to maintain enforcement, no matter where the workload runs.
Overcome multicloud complexity with FullProxy and F5. Secure networking capabilities that span your multicloud environment eliminate the overhead of managing disparate tools and policies for each unique cloud stack, all while reducing overall risk and the likelihood of a costly breach. See our F5 Distributed Cloud Services page to learn more.
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