Enterprises see multi-cloud as a promising path to digital transformation. However, multi-cloud brings greater risk to data from cyber threats and data breaches. Read on to know more…
Multi-cloud is seen by enterprises as a viable road to digital transformation, as well as a speedy on-ramp to revitalising IT and generating new income streams. However, many businesses make mistakes while migrating decades-old legacy systems to public, private, and community clouds, enabling malicious actors access to their most sensitive data.
According to a recent Gartner survey, 81 percent of businesses already deal with two or more cloud providers. In this year, the trend toward multi-cloud adoption will further grow.
Organizations and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are expected to gain a better awareness of the pros and cons of each public cloud provider as they accelerate cloud initiatives to enable remote work and learning in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Let’s have a look at some of the fundamental challenges in securing the multi-cloud framework
Crucial Factor of Data Security
Data is probably the most critical component of Information Technology (IT). Data has become an asset in its own right, similar to Bitcoin, with intrinsic worth that continues to rise. We must safeguard every bit of data at a granular level, rather than securing a database i.e. access versus no access, so that various users will have different data experiences depending on who they are and what role they play.
We’ve already made significant progress in enabling fine-grained data access, but there’s still a lot more work to be done in the field of distributed data stewardship in the coming years.
Human Factor
What makes hybrid multi-cloud so difficult to get properly in terms of security is how reliant it is on training and keeping its personnel up to date on new integration and security strategies. The more manual the multi-cloud integration process is, the more likely an error may be made, exposing applications, network segments, and storage systems.
How common are human-caused multi-cloud configuration errors? According to Gartner, 50% of enterprises would unintentionally and inadvertently expose some applications, network segments, storage, and APIs to the public cloud, up from 25 percent in 2018. By 2023, nearly all i.e. 99 percent of cloud security errors will be traced back to incorrectly configured manual controls.
In 2017, a misconfigured AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket exposed the personal information of around 123 million Americans. Experian, a credit bureau, sold its data to Alteryx, a company that specialises in online marketing and data analytics. Alteryx was the one who made the data public. Misconfigurations like these can be fatal for any cloud-based business.
Lack of Compliance and Governance
When it comes to multi-cloud deployments, the most costly mistakes organisations make today are a lack of compliance and governance. They are not only paying fines for noncompliance, but they are also permanently losing clients if their data is compromised in a breach.
The high-profile SolarWinds breach recently exposed multi-cloud’s flaws and demonstrated the necessity for Zero Trust frameworks. Gaps between old systems and public, private, and community clouds that allow malicious actors to steal client data are illegal under the EU’s GDPR laws.
By standardising on a small set of monitoring tools, enterprises can gain better real-time visibility and control across all cloud instances. That implies cutting back on the number of tools to make sure they don’t conflict with each other.
Multi-cloud is a vital strategy for InfoSec leaders to comprehend, but the hype does not match reality. Too many businesses have large gaps between their cloud platforms.
A Brief Conclusion
As more businesses migrate to public clouds in the coming years, they will also go multi-cloud. This is vital to avoid vendor lock-in, provide business continuity and disaster recovery, and maintain a negotiation leverage with cloud providers.
As the multi-cloud adoption trend continues, cloud security will become increasingly critical for any enterprises seeking to protect its data from cyber threats.