Data Security: The Advantages of Hybrid vs. Public Clouds
Actian Corporation
February 29, 2024
As an industry, we often discuss proper and effective data analysis, however data security is actually even more important. After all, what good is effective analysis without securing the foundational data? Additionally, in 2024 there are numerous clouds one can persist data within including public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. This raises the natural question of how to properly secure your data for the cloud.
Public, Multi-Cloud, and Hybrid Clouds
It helps to start with a baseline of common terminology used throughout the industry. Public clouds are publicly accessible compute and storage services provided by third-party cloud providers. Multi-cloud is simply an architecture composed of services originating from more than one public cloud.
A hybrid cloud is composed of different interconnected public and private clouds that work together sharing data and processing tasks. Interconnectivity between hybrid environments is established with local area networks, wide area networks, VPNs, and APIs. Like all cloud environments, hybrid environments leverage virtualization, containerization, and software-defined networking and storage technologies. And dedicated management planes allow users to allocate resources and scale on-demand.
Security Benefits of Hybrid Cloud Architecture
A hybrid cloud is ideal when you want to leverage both the scale of public cloud services while also securing and retaining a subset of your data on-premises. This helps an organization retain and secure compliance and to address data security policies. Sensitive datasets can be retained on-premises while less sensitive assets may be published to public cloud services.
Hybrid clouds provide the ability to scale on-demand public services during peak workloads. Organizations reap cost optimization by being able to leverage both on-premises and public cloud services and storage assets. And there are disaster recovery and geographic failover benefits to hybrid cloud solutions. Finally, a hybrid cloud enables businesses to gradually migrate legacy applications and datasets from on-premises to public cloud environments.
Actian’s Data Platform
The Actian Data Platform coupled with DataConnect provides no-code, low-code and pro-code data integrations that enable hybrid cloud data solutions. Actian DataConnect provides enterprise-grade integration with connectivity support for both our public and private cloud data platforms. Public cloud data services can be provisioned using SOAP or REST API access with configurable authentication. Users are able to schedule and execute data integration jobs that securely move data across all Actian Data Platform environments. Both at-rest and in-flight data encryption can also be implemented.
The Actian Data Platform’s data warehousing component can be scaled up and down in real-time, this helps greatly with right-sizing workload scale. The Actian public cloud data warehouse is built on decades of patented real-time query processing and optimizer innovations. In summary, the Actian Data Platform is unique in its ability to collect, manage, and analyze data in real-time, leveraging its native data integration, data quality, and data warehouse capabilities in an easy-to-use single platform.
