Security Architecture for Hybrid Cloud

Chapter 8. Infrastructure Security

These days, the term “IT infrastructure” has a different meaning than fifteen years ago. At that time, most of the infrastructure had the goal of running both applications on physical or virtualized systems hosted in on-premises data centers. In a hybrid cloud context, the infrastructure is a mixture of on-premises installed systems with different types of cloud service models using different cloud computing platforms.

Another evolution also took place with industrial control systems (ICS) and operational technology (OT), resulting in a tighter integration between the IT and OT worlds. Together, these different technologies extended the scope of IT infrastructure.

Operational Technology

Operational technology is hardware and software used for monitoring and controlling industrial equipment, assets, processes, and events. In the past, OT devices weren’t connected to the IT environment but these days the systems monitoring and controlling these OT devices are integrated with the IT environment. A similar situation is taking place with Internet of Things (IoT) devices connected to the internet. The IoT devices are sometimes part of an OT environment, sometimes just an extension to the IT environment (e.g., wearables as an extension to end-user devices).

The logical consequence of these evolutions at the infrastructure level is that security had to evolve as well to cope with new threats. So, in this chapter, we refer to the term “infrastructure ...