Multicloud environments can work to an organization’s advantage by helping it remain competitive and meet business goals, but it also comes with its own set of security challenges
The catastrophic pandemic and the resulting new ways of working are fuelling a shift to a multi-cloud environment for businesses everywhere. However, even before the pandemic, several organizations were operating in a multicloud environment. But as more organizations adjust to a decentralized workforce and reorganize their business models, this dependence on multiple cloud platforms will soon become the norm.
Security Risks in a Multicloud Environment
The rush to achieve digital transformation to remain competitive and meet business goals often puts data security at risk. While the multi-cloud approach provides many advantages, like flexibility and scalability, it also comes with unanticipated risks. The distributed cloud landscape leads to uncertainty around ownership of data security in the cloud, policy blind spots, and shadow IT to introduce vulnerabilities and misconfiguration, leading to data loss.
Beyond the pandemic, the driving force behind multicloud adoptions includes mergers and acquisitions. The cost and capability differences among providers also result in a more diversified approach. However, maintaining multiple cloud providers can create uncertainty if mature enterprise governance is not in place.
The majority of enterprises today use multiple clouds. This has led the CIOs and CISOs to ask some essential questions about securing the hybrid multicloud platform, such as developing secure applications and managing security policies regulations. It may seem difficult to tackle, but there multiple ways that CIOs can go about securing their organization’s hybrid multicloud.
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Developing a Multicloud Strategy
A strong multicloud governance has varied benefits, like cost advantages and better integration with existing security processes.
It is crucial to cultivate an efficient multicloud security strategy, starting with a discovery phase that includes an inventory of current cloud providers in use, and how they function. To develop a multicloud plan, an organization needs to do more than recognize that multicloud is simply a phenomenon. Instead, the organization must align its processes, tools, operational mindset, monitoring capabilities, and other elements of its security plan to consider that multiple providers are in play. It is also important to keep risk tolerance and compliance requirements into consideration.
The IT department of any organization has to be kept well-informed and connected to the organization’s cloud usages at all times. An ongoing mechanism also needs to be in place to monitor cloud relationships. It will only help drive forward any changes required to those relationships based on the organization’s internal business environment, regulatory changes, or other factors requiring flexibility.
For the success of a multicloud environment, a holistic strategy has to ensure value is being added while minimizing the related security risks. For that to happen, organizations need to understand their current state and then align any added cloud usages with foundational elements of their underlying enterprise security and vendor management plans.
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Multicloud environments have a big hand in enhancing an organizations’ ability to leverage technology better, given they pay close attention to how the cloud services are deployed and secured.
The right tools and the proper training can help bolster overall security in the multi cloud environment, and it also helps to quickly identify suspicious activity on the network. If rightly managed, a multicloud environment can also help organizations weed out problems related to legacy systems.
