The result has been astounding. In just a few years, over 80% of enterprises have adopted two or more public cloud infrastructure providers, and nearly two-thirds are using three or more.
While the business advantages are significant, this rapid migration is also introducing complexities and risks that few organisations have adequately prepared for - right at a time when the cybersecurity skills gap is dangerously wide, and cybercriminals are more capable of exploiting vulnerabilities than ever before.
Here are a few of the challenges that unchecked cloud adoption has introduced:
As a result, the organisation has little idea of what services are being used, where corporate information is being stored, who has access to it, or what security strategies are in place to protect it.
What many organisations may not realise when moving to a cloud environment is to what extent they are responsible for securing their own cloud environment.
Cloud providers secure the infrastructure, such as storage and compute resources shared by everyone, but securing data, content, and applications are all the responsibility of the cloud customer. And those security controls need to be built separately inside each cloud environment that has been adopted.
If those security solutions aren’t fully integrated and interoperable across multiple environments, then the number and variety of security tools that need to be implemented can compound, quickly overwhelming the resources available to manage them.
Part of the challenge is that the cloud has become so large and so complex that the word itself has lost much of its meaning. Even the term multi-cloud isn’t much better. So, to build an effective, consistent, and manageable cloud strategy we need to start by clearly defining what we mean when we talk about the cloud.
Eventually, all organisations will end up having deployed some combination of the cloud solutions described above. However, adopting multi-cloud environments not only expands the attack surface and complicates the ability to deploy, manage, and orchestrate security with consistent visibility and control, but it also increases other cyber risks, including data breaches and account hijacking.
Addressing these challenges, however, needs to be handled delicately. Performance cannot be sacrificed for security. Instead, organisations need to strike a balance between ubiquitous, on-demand cloud services and establishing consistent controls, policies, and processes. This requires looking for security solutions that help you move from a model where security inhibits business agility, to a model where security can be combined with cloud and automation to help business move faster and more securely.
