Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 33 | Page 56

FEATURE: SECURING MULTI-CLOUD critical areas that need to be managed effectively are application availability and security, and, a multi-cloud strategy can make this more challenging. By using a variety of public cloud services, the line of defence runs across more than one single provider and applications could be located in multiple clouds and on-premises data centres, so it is essential that robust load balancing, secure networking and security measures are put in place. Organisations must ensure the security of their infrastructures even though public clouds may offer security services or a business can be susceptible to costly security breaches. What approach should enterprises adopt in the case of load balancing and ADC technology? For enterprise businesses, load balancing is not just about managing traffic anymore. As business infrastructure expands to include applications in public, private and hybrid clouds, application delivery has evolved from a technology function to a business function that delivers value to the business as a whole. Enterprises require five key adoption techniques to unravel complexity. 1. Visibility and analytics are key to the performance and reliability of applications that are critical to the business. Incorporating automation to set baselines for application performance and user behaviour enables the organisation to have visibility into which assets are doing well and which may be due for optimisation. When a problem is discovered, contextual information helps the operations team troubleshoot faster and more efficiently so the customer experience can continue with little or no interruption and anomaly detection can be used to drive proactive and even predictive responses. 2. Integrated security helps secure business apps at scale without adding to the security team’s workload. Security that is integrated into the load balancing solution provides the best defence. Bolton security products tend to be complex and hard to configure, particularly with regard to application security. Configuration and management of security features and the ability to adjust policies at a granular level needs to be straightforward and easy. 3. Centralised management gives greater flexibility to respond quickly to changing business environments. A centralised management system that operates with an advanced load balancing solution will prevent conflicting policies. It will also ensure visibility of the application stack in both public and private clouds, as well as enable multiple regions to accommodate high availability, regulatory requirements, or other needs. 4. Support for containers simplifies and enables app portability across the infrastructure. Today application infrastructure is becoming more and more complex; therefore, adoption of containers is becoming a growing method to address this complexity. Containers can orchestrate computing, 56 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com