Page 173 - Cyber Defense eMagazine December 2022 Edition

complexity of a hybrid environment must be tied together with common management, unified policies and
a consistent security model.

Load Balancing in a Cloudy World

In cloud operating environments, whether on-premises or hosted, the principles around load balancing
have changed significantly. While the core of load balancing is still fundamentally centered on providing
intelligent traffic distribution across endpoints, data centers or clouds, there are new considerations that
must be taken into account.

In the past, the common approach was to consolidate as many applications as possible onto a centralized
multi-tenant set of physical appliances. With the advancements made in x86 architecture and efficiency,
virtualized load balancers have become more popular given they are now able to deliver significantly
more performance. The idea of creating smaller blast radii that allow for more frequent changes with
micro-impact footprints has driven the adoption of per-app or per-service load balancers that are only
responsible for proxying a very small part of the environment.

With this approach, modifications and updates that have unintended impacts have a minimal impact on
the overall environment. Similarly, when this architecture is used to facilitate segmentation and support
the limiting of lateral movement, successful breaches from threat actors only impact a small amount of
the ecosystem.

Cloud-native application architecture is another key driver for enterprise strategy around load balancing.
When building new apps with cloud-native architecture principles as the cornerstone, it’s very likely that
these workloads will be deployed alongside traditional infrastructure. Load balancers with the right
capabilities can help to bridge gaps in this scenario, for example, by enabling the scaling dynamism that
exists within a containerized environment to be reflected in the physical network automatically.

The need for this is reflected by the increase in customer RFPs that call out the need for load balancers
under consideration to have the ability to understand the context and schema of Kubernetes container
management environments.

Blueprint for a Sustainable Strategy

Principles are key in IT because they allow operators to be flexible and respond in a way that’s not
possible with a fixed set of static rules. Good principles drive good decision-making in agile and dynamic
environments.

Given the complexity of modern IT, the demands on the office of the CIO and the operational challenges
facing I&O teams, it is vital to have a set of foundational principles to drive the strategy around the
selection and use of the critical component of load balancing.

Here are a few principles to consider:

Cyber Defense eMagazine – December 2022 Edition 173
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