Poor Security Increases Cloud Costs by as Much as 3X. Here’s Why...

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Poor Security Increases Cloud Costs by as Much as 3X. Here’s Why...

In our last post, we covered some of the ongoing costs of poor cybersecurity practices. Organizations with inadequate security often suffer from network performance problems and have increased IT staffing needs due to improperly tuned security tools. Inflexible security environments limit remote work and data sharing with partners and suppliers. Inadequate security also creates a roadblock to digital transformation initiatives.

Those indirect costs can be difficult to measure. However, organizations can easily justify security improvements by looking at the impact on their cloud budget.

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A lot of organizations treat the cloud like it’s a machine on a local network. They move an application to a public cloud service and expose it to the rest of the world through a network-layer firewall. In this scenario, you’re simply taking advantage of remote virtualization and missing out on all of the benefits of a true cloud environment.

It’s also the most expensive way to use a cloud service. Yes, cloud services support that model, but that wasn’t the design intention. Because it’s difficult to run their environment that way, cloud providers charge more.

Legacy cloud security practices are part of what drives the remote virtualization approach to the cloud. A modern security model allows you to use the cloud as it was meant to be used, which is significantly more cost-effective, efficient, and secure.

At DeSeMa, we can help you understand where you are losing money to legacy security practices, as well as how you can improve your current cloud security. Explore our website to see how we can help, and continue reading below to learn more about cloud security.

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Taking Full Advantage of the Cloud

The best approach is to port the application to a data service and move the application logic to a serverless architecture. The cost of running that service will be about one-third the cost of remote virtualization.

Moving applications in this way will be more secure because it’s protected by the cloud provider’s built-in services. If you run a virtual machine (VM) on cloud infrastructure, you have to secure everything about that VM. It has its own operating system, network, and other components that you have to configure, maintain, and secure. However, if you port the application to a cloud-native platform, most of those security features are available for free as part of the service. They’re deployed and maintained at peak performance by the cloud provider, reducing risk and operational overhead.

A cloud-native platform also scales better. With virtualization, you have to define the address and connection for every system. If the application starts coming under heavy load, you have to build more VMs and define more services to balance the traffic. On the other hand, if you use a cloud-native component, it will automatically expand your application for you.

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Reining in Your Cloud Budget

Cloud providers make a lot of money selling remote virtualization services because organizations are resistant to change. They want to keep doing things in a familiar way, so they use the cloud as if it’s a legacy data center. When cloud services first became available, they didn’t offer VMs. You had to port your application to a cloud-native system. However, providers discovered there was a market for remote VM management at a higher price. If you want to consume the cloud in that fashion, they’re willing to charge you.

Porting your application to a cloud-native platform has a cost to it, but it will pay for itself in less than a year by eliminating the cost of operating a remote virtual environment.

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How DeSeMa Can Help

DeSeMa’s consultants include some of the senior-most individuals responsible for building cloud security services, such as AWS, Azure, GCP, Google Workspace, and Office 365. We also have well-known contributors to the PHP, Java, and Python coding languages on our team. We are here to help you develop the right cloud strategy and port legacy applications to a cloud-native platform.

Poor security is forcing organizations to run VMs in the cloud, treating their cloud platforms like a legacy data center. Let us help you consume the cloud the way it was designed to be consumed, so you can benefit from built-in elasticity and cloud security and recognize significant cost savings. Give us a call to get started today!

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