Insights

Six ways to secure your multicloud environment

Muraleekrishnan Nair

More organizations now realize the significance of a multicloud strategy that combines the best of multiple cloud platforms into one. In fact, 55% of organizations use multiple public clouds.

Multicloud eliminates vendor lock-in, which can curb business growth and undermine the reason for migrating to the cloud in the first place. It also equips enterprises to tap the unique features of cloud providers and specific offers. Furthermore, multicloud environments offer unparalleled levels of resilience and agility with enhanced redundancy and reduced downtime.

After all, cost management is a factor that is always at the center stage for any business that has embraced cloud transformation, studies often place security as the second biggest concern (behind costs) for the cloud.

But no cloud transformation is without challenges. Multicloud environments increase the complexity in governance and can be more vulnerable to data breaches and attacks and system vulnerabilities due to their virtual infrastructure across planes and platforms.

So, how should organizations approach multicloud security?

Establish Clear Governance

Keeping a complex cloud environment safe requires a fundamentally clear management policy and user guide based on a company’s culture. Having clearly defined structure to the cloud eliminates some, but not all, concerns of misuse that can open organizations up to additional security risks.

Invest in Greater Visibility and Centralized Monitoring

One of the main reasons multicloud environments battle security incidents is the lack of visibility into each cloud platform. Enterprises should consider leveraging a tool that can monitor all cloud platforms and present rich insights in one single place.

A single source of truth with seamless dashboard views of everything in one unified interface can make all the difference. A platform that can aggregate operational data from across multiple cloud platforms, e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure, offers a single pane of glass view and centralizes all control across all cloud environments, containerized or on-prem infrastructures.

Consider investing in a multicloud management platform that centralizes monitoring with a built-in dashboard that can integrate with all monitoring systems, capturing and aggregating logs, metrics, and operational alerts in real-time. With such a system in place, multicloud teams can maintain security and incident management even for the most complex infrastructures.

Conduct Security Assessment Across Public, Private and On-prem Environments

Each enterprise is unique, and so are the security challenges they face on a day-to-day basis. Consequently, multicloud security strategies need to be customized to specific business environments and setups.

The process begins with a comprehensive assessment of the existing cloud infrastructure (public, private clouds, and on-prem) to better understand the state of systems to devise a bespoke security strategy roadmap.

Collaborating with an organization that specializes in cloud forensics is a great way to identify vulnerabilities and scope for improvement, setting a solid foundation for the process to follow.

Create Actionable Incident Remediation for Standardization and Control

Maintaining consistent security levels across multiple private and public clouds with adequate regulatory compliance is a cornerstone of multicloud security management.

Your multicloud security strategy must encompass actionable remediation for incidents. Smart monitoring tools can log incidents automatically and generate alerts based on defined thresholds.

Automating remediations and incident management reduce disruptions and boost resilience in disparate cloud environments with siloed teams.

Such actionable remediations combined with policies help standardize security enforcement and compliance, reducing incidents by 30% or more.

Integrate Third-Party Tools for Increased Flexibility

No single tool will possess every essential functionality required for today and the future as business priorities constantly shift. Only a multi-faceted, multicloud security strategy reduces incident levels.

Your multicloud management platform should integrate with third-party tools to enhance security optimization so administrators can harness proven methodologies and tools for securing their complex multicloud environments without the need for constantly switching between tens of platforms and tools.

Clearly Define Roles and Responsibilities

The move to multicloud inevitably requires additional requisite skills and expertise to manage security in the expansive ecosystem. It also requires a senior leader responsible for managing the entire process. It’s a real concern: 30% of IDG survey respondents worried their lack of cloud security expertise was a big issue.

Businesses should consider reskilling their workforce in addition to roping in dedicated talent and partnering with organizations that specialize in multicloud security management.

Multicloud Security is Possible

Moving to a multicloud environment has many benefits, but only if you invest in its security and compliance. By selecting the right management platform that allows for security assessment with automated remediation and upskilling your employees’ security awareness and effective use of the tools, a secure multicloud solution is well within reach.

Learn how UST’s Cloud Manager can help businesses manage and secure complex multicloud environments with its end-to-end ITaaS platform with built-in deep monitoring and visibility, standardization and control, and active remediation.