Keys to Staying Secure in Multi-Cloud Environment

The benefits to embracing a multi-cloud infrastructure are quite clear, especially when competing in today’s digital economy. However, without taking the right precautions upfront, embracing a multi-cloud infrastructure to support innovative development and deployment of new offerings can represent big complexities — complexities that organizations need to address to avoid security pitfalls. And, no business can afford to suffer the consequences of failing to properly protect data access or adhere to compliance regulations.

After all, with the dynamic nature of multi-cloud deployments, it’s critical to align the activities of security, operations, and development teams to maintain security and compliance.

Let’s look at ways an organization can ensure that multi-cloud environments remain secure. 

1. Establish actionable, compliance-based policies. Considering the speed of development and deployment common in today’s multi-cloud environments, organizations need to embrace policies that embed compliance and security testing into both the service delivery process and software development lifecycle. The most effective route is to embrace cloud-based offerings capable of providing continuous verification, analytics, and governance throughout your software delivery and cloud operations processes.

Of course, in taking this approach, it is crucial to ensure that the solution provides cloud security scoring and vulnerability remediation for the most commonly utilized public cloud services. Additionally, compliance, security, and governance of both private and hybrid clouds is necessary if the organization hopes to fully protect a comprehensive multi-cloud deployment that rarely stops with public cloud deployments.

Successful multi-cloud security requires checking and enforcing critical configurations of cloud services as well as vulnerabilities in application libraries and web application components. The security of any multi-cloud infrastructure depends on the proper configuration of numerous services across an entire array of resources.

2. Take calculated action. When a multi-cloud deployment is coupled with a well-managed strategy, organizations have access to actionable data including cross functional visibility. This information is crucial as an organization works to prioritize and remediate risks based on the potential impact to the business.

Its seamless access to vulnerability data, performance trends, and SLA compliance that enables an organization to quickly prioritize remediation tasks and take any needed action. Likewise, streamlined workflows combine scan verification and remediation tasks, while blind-spot awareness enables organizations to identify areas of any infrastructure that lacks constant monitoring and ultimately leave the organization exposed.

The goal of any successful multi-cloud security strategy is to have measures in place that enable teams to address issues early on – at the time when they are easiest and least costly to fix.

Simply put, security cannot take the backseat – and everyone within the organization needs to take responsibility for their role. As such, a key part of building out a multi-cloud strategy, involves incorporating security into each component – security that provides visibility and recommends any necessary action when issues arise.

See how BMC Multi-Cloud Management helps optimize your current IT systems while ensuring a secure, cost-effective transition to the clouds of your choice. Learn more.