More organizations are looking to move out of their data centers and private cloud environments and into the dynamic world of public and hybrid cloud architectures. There are many reasons for this, including cost savings with utility billing, shorter and easier provisioning time and the ability to spin up servers, when needed, to handle project-specific workloads and tasks.
Despite these benefits, access to these servers, and the applications being served from them, continues to challenge organizations. Do the servers and applications fall into the same bucket as enterprise server and application access policies? Are cloud servers “special snowflakes” that require specialized policies that pertain to servers outside of the data center? Do the complexities of cloud make these servers and applications impossible to audit effectively?