Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 33 | Page 57

FEATURE: SECURING MULTI-CLOUD networking and storage infrastructure on behalf of user workloads. This lets the organisation deploy cloudnative applications anywhere and control them with confidence. Any advanced load balancing technology that supports containers not only has to be able to automatically scale to accommodate changes in application traffic, but also must automatically update itself when changes are made to the infrastructure. Operations teams will not have to configure policies or otherwise actively manage the load after the advanced load balancing solution is configured. This allows operations teams to function more efficiently and organisations will get more value from them. How is A10 helping customers to overcome these kinds of challenges? With the rise in globally dispersed enterprises and new work-from-home requirements that are increasing traffic, application service infrastructures are no longer residing in data centres alone. Modern apps are increasingly housed in public, private and hybrid clouds, forcing application delivery controllers to evolve to provide better user experience, application availability and security. This is where A10 Networks’ application delivery solution is helping customers ensure their business applications are secure, consistent and highly available in any multi-cloud environment. How crucial is application visibility for enabling a secure infrastructure? Application visibility is vital to infrastructure, particularly in multi-cloud environments, to ensure that organisations can gain valuable insights into application performance, health and security. These insights allow enterprises to continuously optimise app performance and balance traffic across the network. This enables businesses to ensure high availability and the best user experience. What benefits will be realised by organisations that implement an application delivery strategy for multicloud experience? Multi-cloud application deployments are playing a foundational role in everything from internal business needs to Digital Transformation initiatives – but it is also essential for IT operators to ensure effective visibility, governance, security and control across both public clouds and private clouds. The three key benefits that an application delivery strategy will need to provide include the following: • Enhanced Application Availability: Ensure efficient and reliable application delivery across multiple data centres and clouds, minimising latency and downtime and enhancing end-user experience. • Comprehensive Application Security: Increase application security with advanced SSL/TLS offload, single signon (SSO), DDoS protection and web application firewall (WAF) capabilities. • Complete Application Visibility: Integrate a centralised management and analytics solution to gain deep perapplication visibility and comprehensive controls for secure application delivery across on-premises data centres, public, private and hybrid clouds. How can CIOs/CISOs best transition to this approach? The three key best practice approaches for implementing multi-cloud involve internal application discovery, performing security assessments and compliance planning. Internal application discovery: The challenges with hybrid and multi-cloud networks include issues such as latency as well as the volume of data transmitted through the network. This can have a harmful effect on the infrastructure if you do not have a thorough understanding of the mapping and data volume between application dependencies. This is where organisations need to perform internal audits on the types of applications and their requirements. Performing security and governance gap assessment is vital to looking at the organisation’s security and regulatory objectives. Documenting the gaps in the business’ controls against accepted best practices enables organisations to identify issues for ongoing maintenance and tweaks. With legacy change controls proving to be slow and inadequate, continuous compliance means constantly looking at the environment and controlling the consumption and usage of cloud services. With the right software controls, businesses can form consistent and repeatable outcomes with fewer errors. • Chris Martin, Channel Leader for EMEA & SAARC, A10 Networks www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 57