Companies are increasingly relocating their operations not just to one, but in many cases to several public clouds. IIn HashiCorp's recent State of the Cloud Strategy Survey, 76 percent of respondents said they already have multi-cloud strategies in place. Another 47 percent of these respondents agreed that security is a key barrier to the cloud. Orca Security identifies challenges and best practices.
Multi-cloud strategies further complicate cloud security and compliance by requiring controls and policies to be applied consistently across multiple cloud environments. However, by following a set of best practices, Orca Security believes security teams can significantly minimize the complexity and overhead of securing a multi-cloud environment, allowing organizations to fully implement their cloud strategy.
What is a multi-cloud strategy?
A multi-cloud strategy occurs when companies use multiple providers of public IaaS cloud services - such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud - to optimize their IT services and infrastructure. Since each cloud provider offers different services and pricing models, using multiple cloud providers allows organizations to get the best service at the best price.
The concept is best explained using an analogy from the supermarket. For example, when customers buy their favorite organic products from a health food store, they accept that the prices are slightly higher. However, for most basic groceries, they prefer to go to a regular store, as the prices there are much lower. In short, they optimize their grocery shopping based on each store's unique offering and pricing, which is akin to a multi-cloud strategy.
What is the difference between the cloud platforms?
Like supermarkets, all cloud providers have similar offerings, but each takes a slightly different approach. It's by no means a complete comparison, but the brief summary below shows how the platforms of the leading cloud providers offer value in different areas:
- AWS offers the widest range of services including compute, storage, database, analytics, network and mobile resources, developer and management tools, IoT, security, and enterprise applications.
- Azure has the advantage of combining productivity and enterprise software (like Office 365 and Teams) with flexible cloud computing resources for developers on one platform.
- Google Cloud is notable for its technological advancement in the field of open source technologies, especially in containers, and played a crucial role in the development of Kubernetes, a container orchestration platform that has now become an industry standard.
What are the benefits of a multi-cloud strategy?
It is not surprising that most companies use multiple cloud platforms as this strategy enables companies to do the following
- Optimize access to services: As discussed above, some cloud providers are more specialized in delivering specific services than others, so it makes sense to choose the best cloud provider for each service you need.
- Risk Spreading and Resiliency: It's always a good idea to avoid "putting everything on one card". For example, if one cloud service provider experiences an outage or other problem, the other cloud platforms are unlikely to be affected.
- Reduce costs and dependencies: By using multiple cloud providers, companies can remain flexible and switch providers to optimize their spend, instead of locking in to one provider and incurring the high operational costs of moving services.
Security and Compliance Challenges of Multi-Cloud Environments
While using multiple cloud providers makes great business sense, it can complicate security and compliance efforts enormously. For example, security controls and policies should be consistent across all areas. Since most native cloud provider security tools only cover their own platform and not all third-party solutions support multiple cloud providers, security and compliance for multi-cloud environments can quickly become an operational nightmare.
When security controls are not consolidated into one platform, the following issues arise:
- Lack of central visibility: The use of different solutions for each cloud platform - and often even multiple solutions per platform, such as Cloud Security Posture Manager (CSPM) and Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) - makes it almost impossible to have a central view of risks to obtain. This means leaders lack a clear view of their overall cloud security posture and which risks need to be addressed most urgently.
- High operational costs: Duplicating security policies across different cloud security and compliance tools can quickly become a drain on an already understaffed cloud security team. Cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs) also require the installation of an agent on each cloud resource to be monitored. The larger and more diversified the cloud resources are, the more time consuming it is to install and maintain agents for each resource.
- Lack of consistency: When organizations are forced to use multiple different cloud security tools, each with different configuration options, ensuring the same security and compliance checks are performed across cloud assets becomes a complex task.
- Increased vulnerability to error: The more manual intervention and duplication of security policies required, the more room there is for human error and misconfigured security controls.
Best practices for multi-cloud security and compliance
Orca offers a single agentless platform for each layer of the cloud environment for AWS, Azure and GCP (Image: Orca Security).
To minimize the complexity and overhead of securing a multi-cloud environment, security leaders should follow these five best practices:
- Insist on multi-cloud support: Make sure your cloud security provider supports multiple cloud provider platforms.
- Consolidate cloud security solutions: Leverage full-stack cloud security solutions (CWPP and CSPM in one - also known as cloud-native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP)) to reduce the number of point solutions and use a single tool for all your replace cloud environments.
- Go agentless: Eliminate resource-intensive agent implementations that limit responsiveness and hamper your ability to move applications to other cloud platforms when needed.
- Platform-specific remediation: Use a cloud security solution with contextual intelligence that prioritizes critical risks and provides platform-specific mitigation guidance to make it easier for users to work across multiple cloud platforms.
- Identify cost-saving strategies: Keep the CISO happy by using a cloud security tool that gives you detailed information about every asset on every cloud platform, including frequency of use. This allows you to provide advice on further cost-saving strategies, e.g. B. moving certain applications to other cloud platforms and consolidating or removing redundant services.
In the multi-cloud age, security has become more complex and time-consuming than ever. However, Orca Security believes that by using a holistic cloud security approach that can establish consistent security controls across multiple cloud environments, complexity and duplication can be significantly reduced. As a result, security teams waste less time on operational tasks and can instead focus on securing the cloud environments.
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About Orca Security
Orca Security, the innovator in cloud security, delivers out-of-the-box security and compliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure—without the gaps in coverage, alarm overload, and operational costs of agents or sidecars. Simplify security and compliance operations and empower your team with a single SaaS platform for cloud security posture management, compliance management, and workload and data protection.