Secure Application Architecture Principles to Improve Cloud Resiliency

SECURE CLOUD ARCHITECTURE: THE FOUNDATION FOR RESILENT APPS

There are a lot of good reasons for a business to move its apps to the cloud, including cost savings, faster deployments, better resilience, and greater elasticity. Knowing this, businesses everywhere are embracing multi-cloud deployments as the best fit for the numerous, highly varied apps in their portfolios—which typically include the full range of classic applications (MS Exchange, SAP, etc.) and custom, in-house apps.

While there are a lot of important considerations when deploying apps in the cloud, two of the most important are security and flexibility. Those considerations, it turns out, are closely linked. The ability to secure web applications, particularly when they are dispersed across multiple cloud locations, can be—indeed, should be—built into your architecture from the outset. Doing so can ensure you keep a consistent security policy across all your applications and can help your users (employees, partners, customers, or all of the above) enjoy a frictionless experience. That consistency also creates a degree of operational flexibility and resilience that makes it significantly easier to respond quickly to unexpected challenges or pivot to take advantage of new opportunities.

There’s got to be a better way. (Spoiler: There is a better way.)

The key to resolving the above roadblocks and cutting through all this complexity? Better cloud visibility. Deep, deep levels of visibility. Visibility for everyone. Visibility across apps, clouds, and the network, readily accessible in a familiar, easy-to-understand interface. Visibility that drives meaningful insights.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

When extensive visibility is easily shared across teams, those teams are able to rapidly diagnose issues and collaboratively solve problems. Visibility enables your teams to monitor, track, and report on the availability and performance of applications—offering value far beyond just effective troubleshooting or root cause analysis. Holistic visibility helps provide answers to some of the most common questions asked by IT and business leaders. Questions like, how many apps are operating on-premises? How many in a particular public cloud? How many of my apps are over-provisioned? What is the status of all my apps, and which ones are failing to deliver an exceptional customer experience?

Whether you’re focused on performance, health, or security (or all three), smooth operation of your application ecosystem requires access to a lot of information and insights. Most often, this information is not bound to a single source but originates from a broad portfolio of application ecosystems, such as load balancers, firewalls, and controllers, as well as analytics-, monitoring- and integration-consumers like Datadog, Uptime Robot, Telegraf, and so on.

With the right levels of visibility across all your apps, cloud architecture, and data sources, everyone from app owners and operational leaders, to business managers and C-suite leaders, should be able to view the entire portfolio in the terms they care about, such as cost center, department, location, and business unit—or any custom-defined metadata. When such capabilities are enabled, each user gains actionable, customized insights that help them make informed, data-driven decisions. And of course, app owners and network operators benefit from a holistic view of the application portfolio, including dependencies that impact performance, availability, and security—ensuring faster deployments and quicker troubleshooting.

The bottom line is organizations that deploy advanced app visibility and management solutions are better prepared to deal with both everyday and extraordinary application challenges. In these organizations, the appropriate teams simply log into a single portal and quickly begin to analyze a wide variety of data relating to the application stack. They can view traffic telemetry, networking telemetry, and even platform telemetry. They can leverage existing baselines to quickly identify anomalous behavior, and then quickly deploy a fix.

This is not farfetched. In fact, it is attainable right now. But it all hinges on cloud visibility and insight. Without that, you’ll continue to live in fear.