Intelligent CIO Kuwait Issue 4 | Page 18

EDITOR’S QUESTION INTELLIGENTCIO This diverse model can often offer the best of all worlds by accommodating different business stakeholders from agile developers to the keepers of highly tuned legacy applications that don’t play nicely in a public cloud. Other elements such as security are also evolving to serve this hybrid IT position. One of the most critical changes is the emergence of a zero trust security model. In simple terms, zero trust does away with the assumption that all access from within the corporate network is trusted and instead verifies everything. This shift makes multi-cloud access management critical and modern enterprises are deploying secure access technologies such as single sign on (SSO) and software defined perimeter (SDP) to simplify the process. SDP aids this by separating the control plane of user authentication and access with the data plane connecting users and applications. Although not a new concept, it has only been within the last few years that it has started to rise in popularity with analyst firms predicting strong 35% CACG over the next five years – in part fuelled by the needs of hybrid IT. Integrating security controls that span on- premise and cloud is also a major trend. This has led to deeper support for open standards for exchanging authentication and authorisation data between parties. Standards such as Security Assertion Mark- up Language (SAML) and OAuth (Open Authorisation) have gained more traction over the last few years and will become increasingly critical for delivering a zero trust future. Data centres and cloud providers need to be aware of this shift and be able to support this switch towards zero trust to remain a valuable part of a hybrid IT ecosystem that looks to be with us for the foreseeable future. www.intelligentcio.com