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Regardless of whether an enterprise's infrastructure operates in a private, public, hybrid cloud or multiple clouds, cybersecurity is a critical component. Some cloud architectures greatly simplify security tasks and tool integrations, but that often comes at the cost of flexibility.

Let's look at the benefits and challenges organizations face as they compare private vs. public cloud security, as well as hybrid cloud security and multi-cloud security, in 2024 and beyond.

As its name implies, private clouds grant a business private access to dedicated infrastructure resources within a cloud. This infrastructure has both advantages and disadvantages.

Private clouds are attractive to organizations seeking more granular control over the underlying infrastructure. This commonly includes customer configuration access to the network, OSes and server virtualization platform.

From a security perspective, private cloud's advantages include the following:

The flexibility of private cloud comes at a cost in two areas: pricing and management.

For these two reasons, it is critically important that IT decision-makers carefully weigh the cybersecurity benefits of private clouds against the added financial expenses and management overhead.

Organizations can employ third-party cloud service providers (CSPs) to manage applications and data within their data center infrastructure. Many CSPs also provide built-in security tools to help protect business-critical data.

Businesses are attracted to public cloud infrastructures for a variety of reasons, including low Capex, service scalability and easing the management workload for in-house IT staff.

Public cloud model security benefits include the following:

Other businesses, especially larger ones with massive IT infrastructures, might find that public cloud security is not the right fit.

Potential public cloud security challenges include the following:

In hybrid cloud environments, some business applications and data reside in public clouds, while others are managed inside private clouds or private data centers.

With hybrid cloud, the whole might be greater than the sum of its parts. Security advantages of hybrid cloud infrastructure include the following:

Like with a private cloud, the flexibility of a hybrid cloud infrastructure has its downsides. For example, decisions about where applications and data reside are a significant responsibility and require deliberation.

Organizations should consider the following potential security disadvantages of the hybrid cloud model:

As the name suggests, a multi-cloud environment involves an organization using two or more cloud platforms or vendors. For example, an organization might use AWS for IaaS, Google App Engine for PaaS, and Microsoft 365 and Salesforce SaaS applications.

As in hybrid environments, multi-cloud deployments enable admins to put applications and data into the service with the most appropriate security levels. Similarly, they can adopt the most secure cloud offerings across CSPs.

Multi-cloud environments also offer the following security benefits:

Like hybrid cloud security challenges, multi-cloud environments require close management and consideration to decide where applications and data should reside. It can be difficult to apply a single security policy across multiple clouds, which can create security gaps. Using multiple clouds also requires security teams to know how to secure each cloud, as well as the best tools to use.

Multi-cloud deployments are also prone to the following security challenges:

With these challenges in mind, remember that many infrastructure security tools are now largely virtualized. This means the same security tools and policy configurations deployed within in-house data centers and across the corporate LAN can extend to private clouds to achieve hybrid or multi-cloud security parity. For many security departments, this greatly reduces security complexity from a uniformity point of view.

When it comes to cloud computing and cloud security, no single architecture is suitable for all businesses. IT architects must gauge the cybersecurity needs for all business applications and data sets. Once defined, the technology services can be categorized and earmarked for deployment in the public or private cloud -- whichever makes the most sense both from a cost and cybersecurity perspective.

Andrew Froehlich is founder of InfraMomentum, an enterprise IT research and analyst firm, and president of West Gate Networks, an IT consulting company. He has been involved in enterprise IT for more than 20 years.

Sharon Shea is executive editor of TechTarget Security.

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Private vs. public cloud security: Benefits and drawbacks - TechTarget