5 Ways Businesses Can Connect to the Cloud

Almost every business wants to use or currently uses cloud computing services in some capacity. Storing data, hosting apps, and scaling computing resources are some of the main business use cases for the cloud.  A hugely important consideration for IT departments from a security and networking perspective is how to connect to the cloud. This article provides an overview of the main options businesses have for connecting to the cloud, whatever your organization’s motive for availing of the cloud’s benefits.

Connecting to The Cloud

How your organization actually connects to the cloud has a significant impact on your company’s cloud workloads, on security, and on your networking configuration. Here are the five main choices. It is worth noting that you can combine different ways of connecting to the cloud depending on your needs.

Web Browser

The easiest and most popular way to connect to the cloud is through a secure web browser connection (HTTPS). Web browsers enable single clients (users) to securely connect to cloud services over the Internet. Because HTTPS is a secure communications protocol, it encrypts any data, such as usernames and passwords, sent over the Internet.

Connecting to the cloud with a web browser is very useful for organizations that want to benefit from the anytime, anywhere access that the cloud promises. Desktops, laptops, and tablets all come with web browsers. Companies offering remote work or WFH policies will find this cloud connection method particularly useful.

VPN

A VPN adds an additional security layer on top of connecting to cloud services via the Internet. The use of web browsers with HTTPS provides one layer of encryption—adding a VPN to the equation gives you two layers of encryption, which is more secure for any business.

It’s worth remembering that attacks on cryptographic algorithms do happen. With a VPN, it is much more difficult to carry out sophisticated encryption attacks by virtue of having two layers of protection. A VPN is essentially a private connection that occurs through a public network (the Internet is a public network).

It’s also worth bearing in mind that with remote work becoming more popular, endpoint security is a greater concern than ever. While web browser access is fine for individuals wanting to use cloud services, companies really need to consider VPNs.

An additional benefit of a VPN for businesses connecting to the cloud is that many organizations use several computing resources spread out geographically that need to communicate with each other. A VPN helps to secure the traffic between these different clouds.

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Direct Dedicated Connections

For businesses and large enterprises needing persistent cloud connectivity and large data transfers, it’s possible to get a direct dedicated connection between the corporate network or data center and the cloud service provider. This connection is private and can provide better performance than Internet-based connectivity.

High uptime guarantees and better cost-efficiency are additional attractions of a direct connection. Most leading cloud providers offer elastic connections, meaning you can easily provision faster or more connections between your corporate network and the cloud provider.

Secure Shell

Secure Shell (SSH) facilitates connections to Linux cloud instances using the command line SSH client on a computer. SSH is a cryptographic protocol, and as such, it enables secure connections to cloud resources (and other computing resources) over unsecured networks, such as the Internet.

Command prompts can introduce technical complexities that employees might find confusing, but SSH is still worth using if secure, encrypted connections are needed to Linux cloud servers. If the desktop workstations at your company don’t have a dedicated SSH client installed on them, you can get PuTTY or OpenSSH for free.

The main use case for SSH is if your company uses cloud services to spin up Linux instances in the cloud and needs to connect to these instances. Reasons for provisioning a virtual Linux instance include testing software on different operating systems or testing changes to network configurations without affecting production environments.

Remote Desktop Protocol

In the context of cloud computing, remote desktop protocol (RDP) enables cloud users to access Windows server virtual machines provisioned on cloud services such as AWS EC2. Remote desktop protocol essentially achieves the same purpose as SSH except that the virtual machine being accessed runs on Windows rather than Linux.

To use remote desktop protocol from a client machine running on Windows, you can use the default client service, which is known as Remote Desktop Connection. Mac users can access Windows cloud instances with Microsoft remote Desktop for Mac. Linux users can simply use the rdesktop client.

Conclusion

That is a summary of the five main ways of connecting to the cloud. For remote work, a VPN is definitely crucial. These connections methods can be combined depending on how well each one fits your company’s security posture, IT budget, and cloud use cases.