Cloud
Room to choose: why flexibility is key for hybrid cloud security
The public cloud continues to explode in popularity, with Gartner predicting worldwide revenues of nearly $600bn by the end of the year. But increasingly, customers are looking closer at private clouds. And when they do, they’re often dismayed at the lack of flexibility offered by their cybersecurity provider.
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This is where Trend excels – offering a full-featured security suite, whatever your cloud environment.
Going private
Despite the continued growth in public cloud, CFOs are starting to ask what the commercial benefits are. Yes, there’s a capex saving, but opex will continue to rise as more workloads are migrated over. As we move into a challenging economic climate, that doesn’t sit well with tighter budgets. That’s why a lot of conversations we’re currently having are around private cloud deployments. These are delivered from customer-owned and managed datacentres, redesigned to optimise the benefits of the cloud: agility, flexibility, automation, orchestration and self provision etc.
Although this work represents a significant cost, it’s a capex cost – meaning at some point the organisation will own the asset outright, unlike the never-ending upward trajectory of public cloud investment. Costs are arguably clearer in the private cloud, and there’s more control. Some organisations are even looking to migrate a select public cloud workloads to their private clouds, realising they are adding no value by sitting in an AWS, Azure or Google datacentre.
The public cloud giants have also noted the trend – Azure Stack and AWS Outpost help customers build private clouds that look and feel the same as public cloud provision.
More flexible security
Why is this important? Because many cybersecurity providers are moving all of their capabilities to SaaS only. That may not be a great fit for private cloud owners that want complete control over release cycles, upgrades and feature enhancements. A public sector organisation recently came to Trend because its incumbent supplier turned off its on-prem capability, for example. Some organisations with private cloud environments may actually want a mixture of SaaS and on-premises: SaaS for the stuff that doesn’t change, but on-premises for infrastructure undergoing significant and continuous change.
The bottom line: choice is important, as is functionality. That’s why Trend Micro doesn’t just offer SaaS and on-prem cloud security – we ensure feature parity, wherever your infrastructure sits today, or is moving to tomorrow.