Hybrid cloud asset management: Everything you must know

Table of Contents

• Hybrid cloud asset management
• Best practices for hybrid cloud digital asset management
  • Describe your governance framework
  • Define a security program designed for the cloud
  • Implement a hybrid cloud strategy 
• Defining your hybrid cloud strategy
• Identifying your cloud needs and requirements
• Defining a governance framework
• Implementing a security program designed for the cloud
• Hybrid clouds are more secure than private clouds
• Manage your assets in cloud easily with Virima

Hybrid cloud asset management is a complex topic. The idea of managing and safeguarding hybrid clouds is relatively new, and companies are still developing best practices for it. 

Here we’ll look at some of the challenges involved in hybrid cloud asset management and what you can do to ensure your company doesn’t run into any problems as you move existing infrastructure to the cloud.

The cloud is here to stay. It’s not just a passing fad, but rather the future of computing. As more and more companies move their operations into the cloud, they’re realizing its many benefits: cost savings, improved efficiency, scalability and flexibility–to name just a few. In fact, according to IDC‘s “Worldwide Public Cloud Services Revenue Forecast” report from 2018, spending on public cloud services was set to  reach $277 billion by 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.9%.

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Hybrid cloud asset management

Hybrid cloud asset management is the process of managing and tracking the lifecycle of IT assets in a hybrid cloud environment. A key organizational function, asset management is performed by all types of organizations, including those with small IT departments and those that outsource their IT services entirely.

Asset management is an essential function for many reasons: it helps ensure compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), improves service quality by identifying problems before they occur, reduces costs through better utilization of hardware resources and software licenses. 

It ensures availability through proactive maintenance activities such as patching systems regularly with security patches or antivirus signatures updated regularly to stop viruses from infecting computers on which they’re installed.

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Best practices for hybrid cloud digital asset management

Describe your governance framework

Your framework for hybrid cloud asset management is meant to make your infrastructure as secure, reliable, and productive as possible. The first step in that process is to identify the assets you want to manage. 

Next, build a system of policies and procedures around those assets that ensures you’re always in compliance with internal regulations or external standards. Finally, implement an auditing system that allows you to regularly review your compliance with these policies and procedures.

Define a security program designed for the cloud

The program should include:

• Cloud access requirements and policies (e.g., multi-factor authentication)
• Cloud-specific vulnerability scanning tools

Implement a hybrid cloud strategy

Implement a strategy that enables you to leverage both public and private clouds in accordance with your business needs, while maintaining consistent data protection processes across all environments

Defining your hybrid cloud strategy

• Identify your hybrid cloud requirements
• Set up a hybrid cloud governance framework
• Understand the benefits of hybrid clouds and define your needs and requirements accordingly

Identifying your cloud needs and requirements

To ensure that you are getting the most out of your hybrid cloud environment, it is important to identify and understand your current requirements. This will enable you to determine what type of assets need protection, how much protection they require, and where they should be stored in order to meet those requirements.

Once these needs have been identified, it is time to develop a strategy for implementing them. A good place to start this process is by defining which services will live on-premises or in the public cloud (or both). 

By mapping out these decisions ahead of time, organizations can minimize their risk while maximizing their flexibility as business needs change over time. Next comes determining how these assets should be protected based upon how sensitive they are from both an access perspective as well as from a data integrity perspective.

Finally the four key components necessary when setting up any effective IT governance framework: policies and procedures, standards/ controls, monitoring and auditing processes, and incident response plans.

Defining a governance framework

Defining a governance framework is fundamental to any successful hybrid cloud environment. In this section, we’ll discuss how to define a governance framework for your hybrid cloud security, compliance, operations and asset management.

In order to ensure that your organization’s data remains secure in the event of an outage or disaster scenario, it’s important that you have defined policies and procedures in place that will guide your team through such situations. These include:

• Data protection policy: This outlines which types of data are required for critical operations within the company and how long each type should be retained before being deleted or archived offsite. It will also specify whether certain sensitive information requires additional protection (such as encryption).
• Disaster recovery plan: This lays out steps taken by IT staff in cases where systems go down unexpectedly due to natural disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes; power outages caused by severe weather conditions; hardware failures caused by electrostatic discharge (ESD) or malicious attacks from hackers attempting penetration into internal networks through various vectors including social engineering techniques such as phishing emails sent via email accounts belonging specifically designed for this purpose, and so on.

Implementing a security program designed for the cloud

• Identify your cloud service provider
• Define your security requirements
• Use the right tools for the job
• Use a managed security service (if available) or cloud access security broker

Hybrid clouds are more secure than private clouds

Hybrid cloud security is a combination of public and private cloud security. Furthermore, hybrid clouds have the advantage of using the right technology for the right job and can be more secure than either a private or public cloud alone.

Hybrid cloud environments are more secure than private clouds because they use traditional firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), antivirus software and other tools that are familiar to IT professionals who manage them. 

They also have stronger user authentication processes than most businesses’ internal networks do today. Ultimately, which helps prevent unauthorized access by employees who have lost or forgotten their passwords or tokens. These factors make hybrid cloud environments less vulnerable than those built on top of virtualized infrastructure running on premises alone. Therefore less susceptible to intrusions.

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Manage your assets in cloud easily with Virima

Hybrid clouds offer the flexibility and scalability of public clouds, but with the security and control of private clouds. They are perfect for companies that want to use both types of cloud for different workloads or applications. 

Cloud based asset management is a complex process. But by using best practices like those outlined in this post, you can make sure your hybrid cloud deployment is successful.

Managing your assets in the cloud is hard enough as it is. How are you supposed to keep track of what’s going on with your assets when it’s not even your job?

At Virima, we know that managing IT assets and configurations can be a huge pain. That’s why we’ve built our CMDB (Service Asset and Configuration Management) to be as powerful and easy-to-use as possible. With our full-featured CMDB, you can finally get a handle on your IT assets whether on-premise or in the cloud.

Our native integration with ViVID Service Mapping allows you to create service maps that help you manage your assets more easily. We even offer Windows agent support for Work from Anywhere (WFA) configuration tracking.

With Virima, you can find your assets across data centers, edge and cloud environments. You can find both agentless and agent-based (Windows) discovery. Our technology provides flexible options for hybrid environments, including on premise, cloud and work from anywhere assets.

Want to know more? Request a demo today!