Secure Your Hybrid Datacenter with A VPN

IBM Bluemix^TM Dev in one of their posts has quoted some IDC figures. According to the post, IDC has committed in one of its reports that almost 80% of IT organizations will replace their traditional datacenters with the hybrid cloud model by 2017. IDC has also forecasted that on an average, 65% of a company’s IT assets will now be hosted off site in cloud datacenters and also collocation.

However, even after these impressive stats and figures, there is still considerable doubt in the minds of a lot of business owners regarding the efficiency and security of hybrid datacenter models.

Why is a hybrid datacenter model complicated?

A hybrid cloud datacenter will be successful if it can integrate a very complex environment on top of infrastructure-as-a-service platforms (IaaS). There are many considerations. The hybrid datacenter has to be fast, secure and it must have a very high uptime. The processing time of requests will also need to be low so that speed and efficiency is not affected. Using a hybrid datacenter means one needs to have a good understanding of the provider environment so that the data can be secured, configured, segmented and accessed without any poor visibility issues. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one such platform that can be used by you to create a hybrid cloud environment for your business.

Why do you need the protection of a VPN for your virtual private cloud?

Since the hybrid environment is complex, there may be issues with speed and efficiency of the system. Moreover, a lot of on-site datacenters have legacy issues that may affect the environment further. A VPN can ensure that a tunnel like passage is created for safe transit of data from on-site locations to your offsite cloud centers. Further, you may also allow your employees to work from home or a BYOD environment and also allow your clients to access your database which may be partially in the cloud and partially located in your company premise.

The whole complexity may lead to gaps if not protected with a VPN service. VPN services adhere to advanced security protocols like IPsec, PPTP, L2TP and others. Furthermore, the data is encrypted using 128 or 256-bit SSL security so that even if the data is stolen, it can’t be used to cause harm. VPNs also ramp up security with the help of NAT firewalls so that the data after leaving a secured exit server passes through a firewall filter before reaching the final destination on the internet. Similarly, when receiving data, the firewall filters out the dangerous elements and gives it entry through a VPN server entry point.

Conclusion

Whether you use VPN and firewall protection provided by the hybrid cloud platform you use or choose a third party VPN is completely up to you. Follow the comparison between AWS-provided VPN and third party VPN on a betanews post to get a more comprehensive idea of advantages and disadvantages of the two types. You all need to know is that you shouldn’t use a hybrid cloud datacenter with VPN protection.