As Enterprise Operations and IT environments have dramatically grown in scale, complexity, and diversity of services, they have typically deployed application and customer environments in silos of dedicated infrastructure.
These silos are built around specific applications, customer environments, business organizations, operational requirements, and regulatory compliance (Sarbanes-Oxley, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act [HIPAA], and PCI DSS) or to address specific proprietary data confidentiality. For example:
- Large enterprises need to isolate HR records, finance, customer credit card details, and so on.
- Resources externally exposed for outsourced projects require separation from internal corporate environments.
- Healthcare organizations must ensure patient record confidentiality.
- Universities need to partition student user services from business or enterprise Operations, student administrative systems, and commercial or sensitive research projects.
- Service providers must separate billing, customer relationship management (CRM), payment systems, reseller portals, and hosted environments.
- Financial organizations need to securely isolate client records and investment, wholesale, and retail banking services.
- Government agencies must partition revenue records, judicial data, social services, operational systems, and so on.
Enabling enterprises to migrate such environments to cloud architecture demands the capability to provide secure isolation while still delivering the management and flexibility benefits of shared resources.
Private and public cloud service providers (CSPs) must enable all customer data, communication, and application environments to be securely separated, protected, and isolated from other tenants.
The separation must be so complete and secure that the tenants have no visibility of each other.
Private CSPs must deliver the secure separation required by their organizational structure, application requirements, or regulatory compliance.
