According to a 2023 Gartner survey, 88% of CISOs feel "moderate to extreme" concern about the risks that misconfiguration and human error pose to multi-cloud environments. The study spotlights the trepidation many feel about building and maintaining consistent security practices across multiple cloud platforms; but the findings also indicate that worry isn’t just limited to information security executives.
Recently, I wrote about the complexity of multi-cloud environments. What I didn’t cover was a strategy for overcoming those challenges, which can also be convoluted. Here, we’ll explore those challenges in greater depth and highlight how our work with Google Cloud Anthos can bring clarity to potentially confusing multi-cloud security practices.
Where’s the issue?
The aforementioned Gartner stat shines a spotlight on the barriers to consistent security practices and preventing mistakes that lead to vulnerabilities across different cloud platforms.
That worry is a patchwork quilt of issues related to:
- Data security and privacy: Ensuring that sensitive data is protected across different cloud providers, each with its own security protocols, encryption standards and privacy policies is critical.
- Identity and access management (IAM): Ensuring consistent and secure access controls across different platforms is challenging, especially when integrating on-premises systems with various cloud services. Mismanagement can lead to unauthorised access or privilege escalation.
- Compliance and regulatory adherence: Different cloud environments might be subject to different regulatory requirements depending on where data is stored and processed. Ensuring compliance with laws such as GDPR, HIPAA or CCPA across all environments can be complex and requires robust auditing and monitoring systems.
- Visibility and monitoring: Maintaining visibility across multiple cloud platforms is difficult but essential for detecting and responding to threats. Security teams need to aggregate and correlate logs and alerts from disparate environments, which may have different logging formats and tools.
- Consistent security policies: Implementing and enforcing consistent security policies across various cloud providers is challenging. Each provider may have different security tools, configurations and capabilities, making it difficult to apply uniform security measures.
- Security tool integration: Enterprises often use a variety of security tools, many of which may not be fully compatible with each cloud provider. Integrating these tools to work seamlessly across different environments is a significant challenge and requires careful planning and management.
- Misconfigurations and human error: With multiple cloud environments, the risk of misconfigurations increases. Misconfigurations are one of the leading causes of cloud security incidents, often due to the complexity of managing different environments and the potential for human error.
- Vendor lock-In and dependency: Relying on a specific cloud provider's security tools and practices can lead to vendor lock-in, making it difficult to switch providers or use a multi-cloud strategy effectively. Balancing the use of native security tools with third-party solutions that work across multiple clouds is a strategic challenge.
Overall, the combination of these challenges requires a comprehensive security strategy, strong governance and the ability to adapt to the evolving security landscape across multiple cloud platforms.
So, how can you navigate this?
Anthos could be your answer
Though we partner with all the main cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud and Azure), I wanted to focus specifically on Google Cloud Anthos.
A hybrid cloud-agnostic container environment, Anthos bridges the gap between legacy software and cloud hardware by using container clusters instead of cloud virtual machines (VMs).
But how can Anthos help ease an anxious CISO’s multi-cloud security concerns? By prioritising the following:
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Consistency
With Anthos, you can enforce consistent security policies and configurations across all your environments. This helps prevent misconfigurations and ensures that security policies are applied uniformly, regardless of the cloud provider. -
Identity and access management
Anthos integrates with existing identity providers, allowing you to manage identities and access across multiple clouds. This helps maintain consistent IAM policies, ensuring users have the correct permissions regardless of which cloud environment they are accessing. -
Visibility
Anthos allows for observability and security for microservices across multiple clouds. It offers features like mutual TLS (mTLS) for secure service-to-service communication and end-to-end application performance and security visibility. -
Compliance
Anthos is a diligent and proactive multi-cloud compliance partner capable of enabling consistent security controls and auditing across multiple environments. It integrates with Google Cloud's security tools, which can help automate compliance reporting and ensure that your infrastructure meets regulatory requirements. Recently, we’ve leveraged Anthos to assist clients work toward making their payments systems Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) compliant, keeping their platforms functional despite the change. -
Secure connectivity
One of Anthos’ biggest advantages is its ability to extend on-premise security controls to your cloud environments and provide a consistent security posture. This can be particularly useful for companies with hybrid cloud strategies. For multi-cluster management, Anthos allows secure, consistent network configurations across clouds, lowering the risk of security breaches brought on by inconsistent network security policies. -
Mitigating vendor lock-in
Anthos provides a layer of abstraction between your applications and the underlying cloud infrastructure. This enables flexibility in moving workloads between clouds without being tied to a specific vendor’s security tools and protocols. Ultimately it reduces the dependency on any one cloud provider's security features, allowing the use of third-party security solutions that work across all environments.
A partner to help make sense of it all
Anthos, Azure Arc and AWS Outposts are primarily designed to integrate seamlessly with their respective cloud ecosystems rather than directly with each other. However, they can be used together in a multi-cloud strategy through common industry standards and third-party tools.
As an experienced cloud partner, we don’t want to just ease CISOs' multi-cloud concerns – we want to help those who leverage these setups turn them into growth opportunities rather than obstacles. Connect with us to learn more about our Google Cloud collaboration.