Are You Cloud Ready? The Top Questions to ask Your Security Vendor

Note:  This is the first in a multi-part blog series on Cloud Ready security questions.  You can follow the entire Security Questions series here, and visit the Barracuda Cloud Ready website here.

Migrating to the cloud can be a complicated process, and moving sensitive business applications to the cloud creates new security requirements. We are seeing this challenge continue to gain momentum with our long-time customers, and as a subject that comes up regularly with new customers who are looking to us for help with public cloud security. In addition, it’s not uncommon for customers to connect legacy on-premises infrastructure to new cloud frameworks in a hybrid environment, which further expands questions on management, access, and policy enforcement.

To help remove this common barrier, Barracuda recently announced new benefits to its Cloud Ready program — offering any organization a free 90-day cloud license for Barracuda Web Application Firewall and Barracuda CloudGen Firewall on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure (Azure).

With the Cloud Ready program in mind, if you are considering or currently migrating applications to the cloud — it would be worth determining whether or not your current security vendors are actually “cloud ready.” To help with that, we’ve put together the list of questions below to start the dialog.

1. Is your solution built on a cloud-centric architecture that is designed to scale with your applications and workloads?
2. Does the solution provide the same functionality in the public cloud as it does for on-premises deployments?
3. Does the solution natively integrate with the public cloud fabric?
4. Can the solution auto-scale for performance and capacity?
5. Can the solution be provisioned and deployed in the public cloud platforms in minutes?
6. Does your solution provide flexible consumption models including pay-as-you-go and metered billing?
7. Can the solution intelligently secure and optimize traffic between your on-premises and cloud networks in a hybrid environment?
8. Can the solution be centrally managed across on-premises and public cloud deployments?
9. Is your solution proven in production across dozens of cloud-focused deployments especially with organizations in similar businesses as yours?
10. Does your public cloud vendor recommend the solution?

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be discussing some of the questions above in series of blog posts to provide additional context around the importance of being cloud ready, and the role that security will play as companies migrate.

Additionally, you can always leverage Barracuda for any cloud questions or challenges you’re facing — we’d love to help. You can also find more information on Barracuda’s public cloud solutions by following the links below.

• Barracuda Cloud Ready Program Press Release – http://cuda.co/pr266
• Barracuda on AWS – https://www.barracuda.com/programs/aws
• Barracuda on Azure – https://www.barracuda.com/programs/azure
• Barracuda Cloud Ready Program – https://www.barracuda.com/cloudready

Note:  This is the first in a multi-part blog series on Cloud Ready security questions.  You can follow the entire Security Questions series here, and follow the Barracuda Cloud Ready blog here.