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How to Deal with Multi-Cloud’s Risks & Regulatory Compliance Challenges?

author
Published By Kumar Raj
Aswin Vijayan
Approved By Aswin Vijayan
Published On May 29th, 2019
Reading Time 4 Minutes Reading

Organizations adopting multi-cloud data management infrastructures encounter several regulatory compliance challenges. In order to overcome multi-cloud’s risks, we are going to describe major IT governance strategies that provide protection to the disparate information.

There exists a broad range of risk management, governance, and regulatory compliance challenges for companies who use a multi-cloud environment. It becomes essential for CIOs to simplify the management solutions of vulnerabilities, develop a shared-responsibility architecture with cloud vendors, fix GDPR compliance challenges, identify microservices used online, and maintain a standard level of shadow IT deployments. Tom McAndrew, CEO of Coalfire Systems Inc., said: “Chief information officers are increasingly covering multi-cloud data management solutions, which comprises of control over the public and private cloud”.

When a company adopts multi-cloud platforms, few device drivers are included within them. It is done to ignore locking the company into a relationship with or dependency on one vendor. A multi-cloud strategy also enhances agility, permits the organization to use new services from several CSPs, and of course, decreases finance at the end. Wait for a second – Keep one thing clear in mind that work flexibility and cost savings in multi-cloud offerings don’t comprise of security from Cybercrime. Multi-cloud benefits comprise of challenges as well over which organizations have to work instead of ignoring them. They should maintain a proper balance and manage work in a way that data security, compliance, and privacy is strong all the time.

Work On the Vulnerability Management

It is important to be known that multi-cloud data management approaches are complicated, which demand particular cloud security and governance standards. Organizations can reduce multi-cloud’s risks by maintaining consistency in approach and knowing driven by these standards. For example – organizations can mitigate the false negatives by simplifying the vulnerability management across multiple infrastructures. This will help IT firms in developing further expertise and use platform-specific products, like Google Cloud Security Command center, Azure security center, and Amazon Inspector, for security management purpose.

Another vital multi-cloud’s risk is originating a shared responsibility infrastructure for IT companies and cloud service providers / private cloud team. It is important to address who is responsible for key control and security process management from both compliance and security perspective. It is usually observed that companies are primarily concerned about the place where data is stored while giving insufficient attention to ‘who has the legal privilege to access that data’. Several of the current cloud data breach incidents were an outcome of organizations who do not concentrate completely on their shared responsibilities and hence, the presence of improper configurations in cloud solutions.

Enhance the Risk Classification Frameworks

The recently enforced EU GDPR regulation and other regulatory compliance challenges have increased awareness regarding policies being used for capturing, recording, and exchanging personal identifiable information (PII). Addressing the PII’s internal use was tough for security teams when all machines resided in a proprietary information center of a company. It becomes even more complicated on hybrid platforms where storage and computer systems might be cloud-based, on-premises, or shared between those 2 platforms.

Sometimes it becomes tough to control automated information copying and backup proceedings in cloud platforms, but companies must be ensured that all transient copies of confidential data have been destroyed. Increase in use of 3rd party microservices to obtain account balances, perform credit checks, conduct background analyzes, and check medical histories also grows the PII concerns. Third-party microservices are day-by-day getting popular for organizations to originate more frequent and develop relationships with their clients. Such sort of services might be hosted in a broad range of public and private systems. Another good habit to overcome multi-cloud’s risks is to simplify controls and monitoring across cloud ecosystems. Azure, GCP, and AWS provide an integrated platform where management and monitoring capabilities are arranged in a systematic manner.

Last Few Suggestion Lines

Cloud services are easy-to-launch; hence, shadow IT continues to grow. This develops a substantial compliance and security threat but, is important to grow IT business. Shadow IT security is one of the most dangerous multi-cloud’s risks for companies because they don’t want to stop the use of this technology but, its security is high. It is essential to search for the methods that enhance data visibility across online instances and services and then, identify what automated machines and notifications are needed to aware security team about the potential challenges. The purpose is to restrict rogue use of shadow IT technology in an organization and reduce the overall associated challenges. At the end of this post, we would like to say that “Cloud is a powerful platform to grow business, and it can prove itself valuable on the basis of its security level that you design.