Hybrid-cloud infrastructure is now the norm for enterprises, according to RightScale’s 2016 State of the Cloud Report, making single-brand loyalty hard to come by. Securing these diverse clouds will require something far different than a rigid, monolithic firewall, according to Gregory Pepper (pictured), security architect at Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.

“No one enterprise is single vendor end-to-end,” Pepper said.

Businesses move workloads around to clouds that best support them, so linking and integrating capabilities are crucial, he said, adding: “Interoperability is the new best of breed.”

Pepper spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during IBM InterConnect 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (*Disclosure below.)

A real-world example drives home this point. “One of my retail customers is building a commerce platform in AWS, but all of the corporate applications are moving to Azure, and separately now they’re looking at Google for other global applications,” said Pepper. “Your security footprint has to be consistent across all of them.”

Shape-shifting cloud security

It is well worth the effort, because the point of cloud is agility and elasticity for saving and making more money, Pepper explained. Companies not embracing agility and building new apps for cloud, but simply lifting and shifting will not see a good return on investment.

“For those people, I say don’t bother,” he said.

For example, retailers shouldn’t have to run at Black Friday scale the entire year; cloud allows them to scale up for that one day and then scale down the rest of the year, saving them money, Pepper stated.

“Security has to have the same model,” he said. Across applications and at fluctuating scale, security must be baked into hybrid-cloud. “Security has to be an integral portion of that; you can’t bolt it on after the fact,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. (*Disclosure: SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE is a media partner at InterConnect. Neither IBM nor other conference sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE