My first Magazine Nutanix Flash Forward | Page 37

Chapter 3: What Is an Enterprise Cloud? 33 increases — bad PR, fines, lost business — companies need to ensure they can adequately secure their technology environments. Security starts with the infrastructure. However, maintaining security with traditional infrastructure environments is challenging for a number of reasons. First among those reasons is the architecture of an infrastructure stack that is comprised of products from multiple vendors with a narrow and limited view of security. Validating and maintaining a security baseline through software upgrades, for example, is time‐consuming and often involves error‐prone manual processes that take away from innovation and productivity. You’re messing around with security when you should be able to work on business‐facing activities. Life is a bit different in the world of the enterprise cloud. In the cloud era, security must be an integral and invisible attribute of enterprise infrastructure. Here are the ways the enterprise cloud helps organizations address security: ✓ Security‐first design: Security specification and testing must be built into every step of product development rather than at the end. ✓ Hardened infrastructure stack: You must do away with a piecemeal approach to security and shift to comprehensive end‐to‐end infrastructure security. When you think of public cloud services from a security perspective, everything below the app is the cloud provider’s responsibility. With the enterprise cloud, on‐premises security must be equally seamless and invisible. ✓ Hands‐off: The infrastructure must include automated security validation and self‐healing capabilities to make security maintenance efficient. Infrastructure and application security does not end at the boundaries of datacenters. The control fabric can take security policies defined and configured in one environment and port them over to the target environment, be it a private datacenter or the public cloud, automatically. These materials are © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.