A platform controller acts as a central nervous system for the enterprise’s IT landscape, enabling intelligent decisions about workload placement and resource management based on both operational needs and regulatory requirements. By automating these processes and providing continuous visibility, it empowers organizations to build more robust, compliant, and sovereign hybrid cloud environments.
Digital Sovereignty
Intelligent workload distribution provides the mechanism to physically locate and manage workloads according to sovereignty requirements, while centralized policy management provides the governance framework to define, implement, and enforce those requirements consistently across the entire IT landscape.
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Data Residency and Locality through Compliance-Aware Workload Distribution A controller enforce data sovereignty requirements by automatically placing workloads and data within specific geographic locations or on infrastructure that meets particular jurisdictional regulations. This ensures compliance with laws like GDPR or specific national data residency rules, while the build-in dependency management ensures that all components of a service that handle sensitive data remain within the designated sovereign boundaries.
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Control over Infrastructure and Data For organizations with strict sovereignty needs, the on-premises portion of the hybrid cloud provides a level of direct control over the physical infrastructure and data. The controller manages the interaction with the cloud in a way that respects these boundaries. Automated workload distribution policies can be configured to prioritize on-premises infrastructure for sensitive workloads whenever possible, leveraging the cloud only when necessary and under strict control.
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Transparency and Auditability for Compliance Continuous audits provide a clear and auditable record of where workloads and data reside and how they are being accessed. This transparency is crucial for demonstrating compliance with sovereignty regulations to auditors and regulatory bodies. Audit logs can track any movement or access of data across the hybrid environment, ensuring adherence to sovereignty policies.
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Mitigating Risks Associated with Foreign Jurisdiction By allowing organizations to keep sensitive data and critical operations on-premises or within specific cloud regions governed by their own laws, the hybrid cloud controller helps mitigate risks associated with foreign government access or legal frameworks. Workload distribution policies can be designed to minimize reliance on cloud providers or regions that pose sovereignty concerns.
Intelligent workload distribution and centralized policy management are crucial for achieving digital sovereignty. The ability to control own digital assets, infrastructure, data, and technological capabilities, alloworganizations to operate independently and securely in the digital realm while adhering to its own laws and values.
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Data Residency and Jurisdiction Intelligent workload distribution ensures that sensitive data is stored and processed within specific geographic boundaries and under the legal jurisdiction of the desired sovereign entity. Centralized policy management enforces these data residency requirements consistently across the hybrid cloud environment, preventing data from inadvertently residing or being processed in locations that could compromise sovereignty.
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Regulatory Compliance Centralized policy management allows organizations to define and enforce policies that align with specific national or regional regulations concerning data privacy, security, and access. Intelligent workload distribution can then automatically place workloads in environments that meet these regulatory requirements, ensuring continuous compliance and reducing the risk of penalties.
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Control and Visibility A centralized policy management framework provides a unified view and control over security and compliance settings across the entire hybrid cloud. Combined with intelligent workload distribution, this enables organizations to track where their data and workloads are located, who has access, and how they are being managed, which is fundamental for maintaining sovereignty.
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Reduced Reliance on Foreign Entities By strategically distributing workloads and enforcing policies related to data localization and the use of domestic cloud providers (where desired or required), organizations can reduce their dependence on foreign technology and service providers, bolstering their digital autonomy.
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Risk Mitigation Automating workload placement based on sovereignty requirements and consistently enforcing security and compliance policies through centralized management minimizes the risk of human error and misconfigurations that could lead to data breaches or non-compliance, thereby safeguarding digital sovereignty.
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Policy Enforcement Across Hybrid Environments Centralized policy management ensures that sovereignty requirements are consistently applied regardless of where the workload resides – on-premises, in a private cloud, or in a public cloud. Intelligent workload distribution respects these policies when placing and moving workloads across these diverse environments.
Resiliency in Hybrid Clouds
A resilient cloud security strategy leverages a private management environment for sensitive control plane functions and employs strong encryption with privately managed keys to create layers of defense. This approach allows organizations to benefit from the scalability and cost-effectiveness of public clouds while maintaining control and security over their most critical assets, thereby protecting them from threats inherent in shared infrastructure.
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Enhanced Availability through Automated Workload Distribution A controller automatically distributes workloads across on-premises and cloud environments based on availability zones and health checks. If one environment experiences an outage or degradation, workloads can be dynamically shifted to a healthy environment, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity. By understanding dependencies, the controller can ensure that if a critical component fails in one environment, dependent workloads are failed over gracefully to a redundant location in the other environment.
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Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity The controller can orchestrate disaster recovery scenarios by automatically replicating data and configurations between on-premises and cloud environments. In the event of a disaster on-premises, critical services can be quickly spun up in the cloud, and vice versa. Automated workload distribution can be configured to maintain active-active or active-passive configurations across environments, providing rapid failover capabilities.
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Optimized Resource Allocation for Stability The controller can monitor resource utilization in both environments and proactively adjust allocations to prevent overloads that could lead to instability. This ensures that critical services always have the necessary resources to operate reliably. Cloud bursting capabilities allow the controller to automatically scale into the cloud during peak demand, preventing on-premises systems from becoming overwhelmed and ensuring consistent performance.
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Continuous Audits for Identifying Potential Weaknesses Continuous audits can identify configuration drifts and compliance violations that might introduce instability or security vulnerabilities. Addressing these issues proactively enhances the overall resilience of the infrastructure. Audit logs provide valuable insights into system behavior and potential points of failure, aiding in the development of more resilient architectures and recovery plans.
A private management environment maintains critical data like accounts, identities, and keys, in combination with encryption, to significantly enhance the protection of companies utilizing shared infrastructure in public clouds. The ability to maintain continuous and reliable IT operations across a combined infrastructure of private and public clouds, and on-premises systems, despite disruptions, failures, or cyberattacks. It encompasses the capacity to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse events while ensuring business continuity and data integrity.
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Reduced Attack Surface By keeping sensitive control plane data (accounts, identities, keys) within a dedicated and controlled private environment, the attack surface exposed to the potentially less secure shared infrastructure of the public cloud is significantly reduced. Attackers gaining access to the public cloud environment will not readily find the critical credentials needed to pivot to other systems or decrypt sensitive data.
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Enhanced Access Control Centralized management of identities and access policies within the private environment allows for strict control over who can access sensitive resources in both the private and public clouds. This reduces the risk of unauthorized access and lateral movement that can occur if identities are managed separately or are compromised in the public cloud.
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Stronger Key Management Maintaining encryption keys within a secure private environment, separate from the data they protect in the public cloud, is crucial. This mitigates the risk of a single point of failure or compromise. Even if an attacker gains access to encrypted data in the public cloud, they will not have access to the keys needed to decrypt it.
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Data Sovereignty and Compliance Keeping critical metadata and encryption keys within a private environment can help organizations meet data sovereignty requirements and comply with regulations that mandate control over sensitive information and access to it.
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Mitigation of Shared Infrastructure Risks Public clouds, by their nature, involve shared infrastructure, which can introduce risks like noisy neighbors, hypervisor vulnerabilities, and potential data commingling (though providers take measures to prevent this). By isolating the management plane and encrypting data with privately held keys, organizations minimize the impact of potential security incidents within the shared public cloud infrastructure on their most critical assets.
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Defense Against Cloud Provider Breaches While public cloud providers invest heavily in security, breaches can still occur. If critical management data and encryption keys are held separately in a private environment, the impact of a breach at the public cloud provider on the organization’s sensitive data and control systems is significantly limited.