One of the first priorities in a hybrid cloud project is ensuring that the traffic flowing between the on- and off-premise components is handled securely, which can take a significant amount of time to achieve. And the more infrastructure is involved, the harder the task becomes. Aviatrix Systems Inc. wants to make things easier for users of its networking software by rolling out new privacy features today that reduce the amount of work needed to prevent unauthorized access.

Chief among them is the addition of support for OpenVPN, which makes it possible to set restrictions on how workers may interact with their organizations’ hybrid clouds. Administrators can  centrally define access policies through Aviatrix’s web-based management console and have the ruleset automatically applied to every section of their environment. Enforcement is carried out by the virtual network gateways that the startup’s software uses to process the traffic at each site, which also handle other key administrative tasks such as packet forwarding, activity logging and encryption.

According to Aviatrix, the latter feature is being enhanced too as part of the new update to complement the OpenVPN integration. The software now provides the option to keep data encrypted while it’s moving from one account to another in a public cloud and even when it’s being transferred to an entirely different platform. For added measure, packets are also scrambled when traversing the private network links that many organizations use to connect to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure. As a result, hackers are left with far fewer opportunities than before to intercept a customer’s traffic.

And administrators, for their part, have to spend less time sorting worrying about protecting their organizations’ cloud infrastructure. Reducing the amount of manual work involved in the process kills two birds with one stone not only frees up resources for other tasks but also lowers the risk of human error, which helps improve security even further.

Image via Geralt