Unify Your Multi-Cloud: How to Create a Cohesive Security Strategy

Whatever your business cloud adoption preference, the best way to protect it is through a unified security strategy. The benefits of a unified and centralized approach outweigh the challenges as firms rush to benefit from the speed, scalability and agility of cloud services.

Many firms have adopted multi-cloud almost by accident as they adopt the various services they need at particular points in the company’s stages of growth. Most firms now have half-a-dozen or more cloud services within their business, while others have taken a more measured approach, carefully selecting cloud services from providers that dovetail neatly to provide an aligned and complementary overall service.

With the growth of multicloud and hybrid cloud adoption among businesses, be they open source or big player (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) solutions or a mix of the two, things get more complex. However a company’s cloud service has developed, it’ll continue to evolve as cloud rapidly becomes the dominant platform. This requires a coherent and cohesive security strategy to protect data and services against the growing range of threats.

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Why do enterprises adopt a multi-cloud approach?

Multi-cloud delivers the services that a business needs to succeed in the marketplace across a wide range of departments. From traditional tools like storage and productivity applications to marketing and HR resources, the cloud can provide it all.

The cloud is also infinitely scalable, helping the company grow, and provides integration and alignment with digital business strategies. But every provider is likely to have different security and privacy features, or none at all, leaving the business to create a multi-cloud security strategy.

Many companies still struggle to get the cloud, but as adoption soars, it quickly becomes the go-to solution for most business needs, with multi-cloud the leading option for a business makeover.

The challenges to a unified cloud security strategy

Due to the multi-part nature of most cloud deployments, any business needs to develop a clear vision on its footprint in terms of understanding your cloud security responsibilities (and those of the providers). Different user interfaces or APIs, a lack of consistent terminology and varying rules of operation all need to be understood and aligned, with gaps identified.

Having established that, reporting tools that develop updated and live visibility into infrastructure and services will enable the company to build strong security and access controls that form the core of any enforceable strategy.

From the CIO down to CISO and IT security team, the focus should be on a strong security framework, using tools like authentication and verification services to protect data and services from breaches or leaks. These need to be repeatable and automated to reduce the massive workload that a wide cloud footprint will create.

Steps to a cohesive multi-cloud security strategy

Knowledge is key to any business strategy, and the CISO or IT security team must be aware of every facet of the cloud services in use across the business. As part of the cloud adoption and managing them, firms will need to recruit experts or provide training in managing and securing each one to avoid a knowledge gap.

Unifying your cloud can be done through the growing range of cloud management platforms that support the business in understanding the underlying complexities of a multi-cloud layout. They can also identify where the company’s policies or compliance and data security rules aren’t being applied. Cloud management platforms can support and develop insight into:

Cloud provisioning, automation and orchestration
Service requests
Governance and policy services
Capacity and resource management
Security and identity
Configuration and updates

They should help provide the detail to deliver on key aspects of a unified security strategy. These include a focus on three main areas: security automation, unified policies and visibility.

Security automation is an essential part of multi-cloud management due to the volume of resources, users and data at work. Each business should already have a range of data policies and compliance rules to follow, and these need to be assigned to each cloud service, with the visibility aspect ensuring that they’re followed and any incidents reported before they can lead to a breach.

In multi-cloud landscapes, workloads can move rapidly across clouds, and this requires a consistent security posture to protect them, especially when it comes to data sovereignty issues or for regulated industries.

Developing a business strategy that defines clearly cloud access rights, data usage, obligations and other aspects will help firms remain in control of their clouds, no matter how they evolve in future. Big-picture dashboards help alert the IT team to any issues and support enforcement, training and enable the CISO or CIO to keep the leadership informed as policies build and the administrative burden grows, even while the benefits of cloud are felt across the business.