A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.

Citizens Property Insurance Corporation

Transform Digital Journey with Confidence Using Hybrid Cloud Computing

Ajay Kumar, CISSP, CGEIT, PMP, works as a Director, Internal Audit (IT) for Citizens Property Insurance Corporation. Ajay leads IT Audit and Data Analytics in this critical and leading role. He is a thought leader with more than 20 years of progressive experience in IT, Data Analytics, Internal Audit, Information Security, Enterprise Architecture, and IT Governance. Ajay has worked in various industries, including Management Consultancy, Finance Services, and Insurance. He has created Data Analytics strategies at multiple organizations and led large programs to implement them since their inception.

Ajay writes articles, publishes white papers, and is a prolific speaker who frequently speaks at conferences and local chapter meetings about IT, Internal Audit, and Data Analytics. He has several certifications, such as CISSP, TOGAF, CISA, CRISC, CGEIT, ITIL, etc. Ajay has two master's degrees from the University of West Florida – an MS in Data Science and an MBA in Analytics, and a bachelor's degree from the Birla Institute of Technology.

Cloud computing benefits are widely understood, and it has become one of the essential ingredients for continued innovation in today's fast-paced business transformations. Even after understanding all these benefits and the desire to provide outstanding service to customers and end users, why are businesses still hesitating to move to the Cloud? Based on my decades of IT consulting and IT leadership experience, the top 3 reasons are:

1. Information Security, Governance, Risk, and Compliance Concerns

2. Challenges with core systems integration and Legacy Systems redesign

3. Lack of understanding of Cloud Costs optimization

Concerns about security and the fear of losing control are one of the top reasons holding businesses back from accelerating their digital transformation journey through cloud migration. So, the question is, Do we have a way to mitigate these concerns and ensure that businesses feel at ease with their decision to move to the Cloud?

The evolution of cloud computing has emerged with new solutions that have the potential to mitigate Security, Governance, Risk, and Compliance concerns of the public Cloud. This evolution has led to a Hybrid Cloud strategy combining processing, data, and storage environments of On-premises, Private Cloud, and Public Cloud - such as Amazon Web
Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

A Hybrid Cloud can help to address security, Governance, Risk and Compliance concerns, control issues, and other barriers that can cause cloud migration to derail. Hybrid clouds combine the benefits of both public and private clouds to offer a responsive, secure option to businesses. Public clouds are well suited for many front-office workloads. However, the private clouds are well suited for mission-critical workloads, where the benefits of the Cloud are most sought-after – but the security and assurance of a closed environment are critical.

Hybrid Cloud provides the benefits of the best of both worlds. It enables businesses and Technology professionals to have complete autonomy in defining where workloads, data, and processing need to exist based on audit findings, the organization's policy, compliance needs, and regulatory requirements. It offers both the control of on-premises hosting and the flexibility of cloud storage, all while reducing the overall risk exposure of data confidentiality, availability, and integrity. As a result, it mitigates security, governance, risk, and compliance concerns. It empowers companies to store data in specific environments that align with business strategy and the industry's regulatory requirements. The centralized management system of the hybrid Cloud makes it easier to strategize, implement, manage and audit technical controls. The controls are centrally accessible whether organizations leverage encryption to reduce the risk of data confidentiality, integrity, and availability or end-point security for data loss prevention. Application deployed on a Hybrid cloud runs with much greater security than on a public cloud.

Hybrid clouds combine the benefits of both public and private clouds to offer a responsive, secure option to businesses

Hybrid Cloud technologies also allow on-premise infrastructure and Clouds (private and Public) to operate seamlessly across multiple standardized technology interfaces. It provides ease of implementation and enables businesses to innovate with agility, improving responsiveness and lowering operating costs even with the added layers of complexity.

As hybrid Cloud continues to grow in popularity, there are many variations in adoption across different industries. In regulated sectors which are more concerned with security and have stringent audit requirements (such as insurance, banking, telecom, government, and healthcare), the cloud mix still leans heavily toward the private Cloud. However, in less regulated industries, it tips the other way. Hybrid Cloud's interoperability means that organizations aren't forced into either environment. Hybrid clouds share services and allow applications, workloads, and resources to migrate between and among public and private clouds. Also, hybrid clouds can help to avoid vendor lock-in. Vendor lock-in creates risk if a vendor suffers production, legal, or financial issues. With the freedom to find the best solution and cloud provider suited for their needs, companies now have access to the most cloud ecosystem opportunities.

Hybrid cloud strategy and implementation continue to be on the rise. It provides better support in a distributed workforce environment, reduces overall costs, improves scalability and control, increases innovation and agility, and improves Business continuity and disaster recovery. It has given businesses more choices than ever to migrate to Cloud and securely accelerate their digital transformation journey.

The articles from these contributors are based on their personal expertise and viewpoints, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of their employers or affiliated organizations.