Why Multi-Cloud Security Demands the Attention of Today's Enterprises?

Enterprises today are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies. While such approaches provide an opportunity to increase flexibility and resilience, this shift has introduced sophisticated security challenges that need to be addressed by business leaders.

The Multi-Cloud Migration: Strategic Considerations

Businesses primarily adopted multi-cloud as a vendor management strategy with the benefit of risk reduction and lock-in prevention. Although the approach has some potential advantages, it involves a great deal of complexity that needs to be managed effectively. In addition to the expense of functioning, geographic reach requirements, especially for data sovereignty-led multinationals, can present a more compelling rationale for the use of multiple clouds. With increasing emphasis on compliance regimes like GDPR and CCPA, firms may need to keep data in a given geography through regional cloud partnerships.

Security challenges in multi-cloud environments:

Organisations notably complicate their security environment when they embrace multi-cloud strategies by:

• Inconsistent control security: Various cloud providers have varying security controls, architectures and control mechanisms, which could create security blind spots and compliance gaps. The inconsistency presents more avenues for an attacker to exploit these configuration errors.
• Identity Management Complexity: Privilege misconfiguration is among the principal reasons for cloud security breaches and is more probable when identities and access controls are being handled across clouds. Without centralised identity control, organisations struggle to maintain the principle of least privilege.
• Visibility Constraints: With limited or no comprehensive visibility across multi-cloud environments, security teams struggle with incident response while threat detection remains siloed. These blind spots enable advanced attacks to move undetected across various cloud platforms.
• Compliance and Price Concerns: Multi-cloud deployment requires advanced compliance frameworks, and over-architecting by developers creates unforeseen cost escalation and resource sprawl.
• Shadow IT Spread: The ease of intercloud provisioning can drive shadow IT problems where departments deploy workloads without adequate security management, resulting in vulnerabilities that weaken the organisation's security posture.

Building Strong Multi-Cloud Security:

• Adopt a Platform Strategy: A good platform strategy is the pillar of good multi-cloud security. By adopting a consistent platform layer that hides cloud heterogeneity, organisations can leverage standardised security controls, governance, and operations across environments. This approach also facilitates centralised policy management and enables teams to leverage the right cloud services for business requirements.
• Zero Trust Architecture: Organisations need to implement zero trust models by verifying all devices, users, and connection requests regardless of geolocation, especially in multi-cloud environments where the traditional network perimeters have evaporated.
• Policy Enforcement: Enforcing consistent security policies across various cloud domains mandatorily requires specialised tools that translate security needs into provider-specific controls. Leading Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) tools like Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR, Splunk SOAR, and Microsoft Sentinel facilitate policy-as-code that allows security needs to be written once and enforced consistently anywhere across all cloud providers. Microsoft Sentinel, for example, is intentionally built to collect and analyse data from a broad spectrum of cloud platforms with the capability to support over 350 discrete solutions in AWS, Google Cloud, and other platforms in addition to Azure
• Advanced threat detection: AI-powered detection systems that detect abnormal behaviour and correlate events across clouds assist in detecting sophisticated attack patterns that would otherwise remain undetected. Multi-cloud management software like Flexera, CloudHealth by VMware, and Nutanix Cloud Manager provide end-to-end security monitoring of cloud infrastructure.

Addressing the Talent Gap:

The lack of adequate cloud security skills continues to be a major issue. Companies are addressing such issues with in-house soft-skills reskilling initiatives, collaborations with specialist security vendors, and security automation.

A strong platform strategy also fills the talent gap by reducing the need to understand the specialised security features of the native security of each of the cloud providers. By abstracting complexity in the form of standardised interfaces, organisations can allow their security teams to manage multi-cloud environments well without necessarily requiring deep technical knowledge of each provider's implementation details.

The Way Forward:

Successful multi-cloud security requires a platform-based approach, with thoughtful consideration that offers consistent architecture, governance, and operational practices across the environments. In addition, this strategy allows organisations to limit complexities and use multiple clouds with one, unified security posture.

Enterprises need to establish cloud platform teams whose role is to build safe, compliant platforms upon which application teams can build without compromising safety. Platform teams bring together business innovation requirements and safety requirements so that firms can move to the cloud safely and cost-effectively. By abstraction, automation, and strong governance in pre-empting security threats, organisations can realise the strategic advantages of multi-cloud without falling victim to its risks.

Written By -- Rick Clark, Global Head of Cloud Advisory, UST

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