Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Radware on multi-cloud deployments

The migration to multi-cloud environments is accelerating. This digital transformation is bringing a range of benefits for businesses, but also complex challenges.

Speaking to 10 Minute IT Gems, Yaniv Hoffman, Vice President of Technologies at Radware, an IT security company with a global presence, explained how the pandemic fast-tracked a shift already underway. "COVID-19 has accelerated and emphasised the importance of the digital transformation that many organisations have been making," he said.

Multi-cloud, the deployment of organisational applications across several public and private cloud platforms, is rapidly becoming the new normal. According to Hoffman, this trend is largely driven by the increased demand for digital services, especially during the pandemic, but there is a strong business case for this approach beyond necessity.

"There are quite a few benefits," Hoffman explained. "The first one is faster rollout of services and applications." In a world where consumers expect instant access to information and services, being able to rapidly deploy new applications is crucial. "This is very important especially in this period where people are reaching for more information or purchasing more online, accessing more online services," he added.

Another key advantage of working in the cloud, Hoffman said, is scalability. "Cloud-based services are ideal for businesses with growing or fluctuating needs. Easily, you can reach operational agility. You could scale up, you can scale down based on your need and the cloud provides you with unlimited scalability and flexibility in that manner."

Cost is another significant factor. "Capex free - you cut out the high cost of hardware, you simply pay as you go and you enjoy a subscription-based model without any concern about setting up the solution or managing the solution. So a lot of headaches are removed from the equation," Hoffman noted.

However, these benefits come with new, and sometimes daunting, challenges. "As applications are scattered across multiple environments, each with its own interfaces, set of tools or delivery methods, it affects many personas within the organisation," he said. "They now need to master new solution variants of cloud environments in order to deliver a consistent service."

The complexity increases as organisations adopt a combination of public and private clouds, and distribute their applications globally. "Our applications are now distributed in more locations - can be in AWS, can be in Azure, Google, Oracle cloud – definitely more complex to manage, more complex to secure, and as a direct result also the total cost of ownership can be increasing as it requires more expertise and attention," Hoffman pointed out.

So, how can organisations tackle these multi-cloud challenges? Hoffman outlined a clear strategy. "In order to minimise the complexity of working in multiple cloud environments and address the challenges, it requires first to standardise the application services and security policies. Do that regardless of the environment in which they are deployed. With such a level of standardisation, consistency can be easily achieved, driving faster and safer services rollout," he explained.

Standardisation, he said, enables "continuous integration, continuous development processes across all cloud environments and, not less important, easy migration across clouds for faster and more agile cross-cloud deployment. No matter whether applications are in the public cloud, in the private cloud, or in the traditional data centre, you need to stand out and you need one pane of glass, one set of methods and tools, to manage them."

Turning to what Radware is doing in this sphere, Hoffman was keen to highlight their comprehensive approach. "We provide a multi-cloud suite of solutions that deliver best of breed application delivery and security solutions for on-premise data centre and private and public clouds using one centralised self-service management and control component. So you can have your application in several locations: in the data centre, in the private cloud, in the public cloud, and on that we can provide the security elements and management elements."

This "single application delivery controller", as Hoffman called it, unifies management with one set of technology and tools. "It's simplified administration. We centralise the policies that are propagated to all of the environments and ensure operational consistency. In other words, no matter where your applications are, our controller will be able to manage, monitor, and operate them. So it reduces the complexity and knowledge that you need to have, because we are masking it," he explained.

Security, of course, remains at the forefront. "In addition, we provide also workload protection against threats in the public cloud, that detect excessive permissions to the workloads, identify security misconfiguration before data exposure occurs. It detects that effect using advanced machine learning algorithms," Hoffman said.

Radware's approach also includes defending against the most sophisticated attacks. "Last but not least, we also provide an optimal DDoS protection to meet any organisation's needs. We do it with the widest coverage with automated zero-day DDoS attack protection, again machine learning, artificial intelligence that is able to counter the next generation attacks: SSL attacks, next generation DNS attacks, the best attacks," he outlined.

All of this, Hoffman stressed, is delivered through a single portal, "one unified management and also with the fully managed service by our battle-proven emergency response team." He added: "Organisations that are using our multi-cloud solution can focus on their business while we take care about their business continuity, data archiving, data protection, and security."

Looking ahead, Hoffman believes the shift to multi-cloud infrastructure is only set to continue. "The journey to the multi-cloud has only now started. It takes some time for IT organisations to replace their old platforms, to move out from the data centre. We'll see more cloud migration to follow, and it will increase in the coming years," he said.

Summing up his advice for organisations embarking on this journey, Hoffman said, "Standardisation in regards to operation across a diverse and distributed landscape is critical for keeping a consistent service. This is my recommendation to organisations that are starting this journey into the multi-cloud."