How to Enhance Security in the Multi-Cloud Era

Over the past two decades, companies have traditionally relied on a single public cloud service provider to manage their digital infrastructure. However, as the need for greater flexibility, resilience, and performance increases, many cutting-edge businesses have turned to multi-cloud security solutions. Multi cloud security is now essential for ensuring high availability across diverse cloud environments. With this, organizations are increasingly adopting multi-cloud platforms to enhance availability and reliability for their critical systems. There are three primary options for mission-critical systems – multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, or hybrid multi-cloud setups.

According to a Dynatrace report, 89 percent of IT firms stated that it’s challenging to secure multi-cloud systems, especially with the rising adoption of containers and Kubernetes. This highlights the importance of a comprehensive multi-cloud security plan. Without robust multi-cloud security solutions, businesses risk exposure to cyber threats across multiple cloud environments.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms use a multi-cloud strategy for many public clouds. In this process, the operational methods and applications that work consistently across multiple domains are abstracted from the variations in cloud providers. As a result, a multi-cloud plan allows companies to use workloads across various cloud platforms, including public and private clouds.

Organizations frequently choose multiple cloud service providers to access the specific features they need at different price points. This approach not only provides companies with greater flexibility in their cloud operations but also maximizes the benefits of multi-cloud—such as performance optimization, reduced risk, and access to specialized tools across multiple platforms.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the key aspects of multi-cloud security, its benefits, challenges, and best practices for effective deployment.

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What is Multi-Cloud Security?

Multi-cloud security is a cybersecurity model that guides companies to protect their applications, data, and other virtualized assets spread over their conditions. Unfortunately, multiple cloud environments are hard enough to handle, and IT teams must manage a wide range of tools, systems, and methods to ensure security throughout their cloud infrastructure.

The multi-cloud security architecture involves a set of solutions and methods used to safeguard operations in diverse cloud environments. By ensuring proper security in this multi-faceted setup, businesses can exploit the full advantages of multi-cloud without putting their data and operations at risk.

The complexity of managing multiple cloud service providers with varying regulations and features introduces several challenges for organizations, such as:

• Ensuring consistent security measures across clouds
• Establishing strong access control protocols
• Detecting vulnerabilities and managing patching
• Maintaining an overarching security view across different cloud environments

While cloud service providers are responsible for securing their infrastructure, businesses must secure their assets and data within each cloud environment. Key responsibilities include:

Cloud vendors have to follow a few procedures, and they are:

• Ensuring the reliability, security, and update of cloud infrastructure
• Protecting data centers and servers
• Offering customer-facing tools for data protection, such as encryption and access management

The company deploying a multi-cloud security strategy is accountable for the management and security of data across all the cloud platforms it uses. This includes implementing disaster recovery plans, security architecture, data loss prevention, and complying with industry regulations.

The internal team in a company must follow:

• Create a plan for cloud disaster recovery
• Create the system architecture for security
• Configure data loss prevention (DLP)
• Make sure that all necessary laws and regulations are followed during operations
• Update third-party tools if necessary
• Create privileges and access rules
• Design secure deployment techniques
• Cloud monitoring management
• Detection and handling of security incidents
• Create backups

Benefits of Multi-Cloud Security

1) Increasing Performance

A multi-cloud security approach enables businesses to build a fast infrastructure that maximizes application performance while lowering the cost of combining cloud solutions with their current IT infrastructure. Companies can build connections that enhance response times and user experience by expanding networks to various cloud providers. In addition, multi-cloud enables companies to pick their preferred cloud service providers, increasing their performance.

2) Rapid Innovation

One of the significant benefits of multi-cloud is the ability to innovate quickly. With the flexibility of choosing various cloud service providers, companies are not locked into a single vendor and can scale or innovate at their own pace, optimizing their resources.

3) Robust Security

Although cloud providers handle the security of their own infrastructure, a multi-cloud security model ensures that companies can use the necessary tools and technologies to protect their data. Continuous evaluation of network security is crucial as cloud architectures and software evolve. By employing multiple cloud vendors, companies can enhance their security strategy by diversifying their risk across different cloud platforms.

4) Improving Flexibility and Scalability

Multi-cloud security allows organizations to easily scale their operations and handle exponential data growth. By choosing the best cloud solutions for their needs, businesses can ensure optimal storage, processing, and scalability without limitations.

5) Numerous Cloud Options

A multi-cloud strategy gives organizations the flexibility to select cloud providers based on the specific features, pricing, and benefits they offer. This variety allows businesses to tailor their cloud infrastructure to their specific requirements, enhancing overall operational efficiency.

Impediments to Multi-Cloud Security

Despite the advantages of multi-cloud security, several challenges need to be addressed:

1) Lack of Visibility

Each cloud provider uses different security tools and approaches, which can make it difficult for internal teams to have a comprehensive view of their security landscape across all cloud environments.

2) Data Governance

Without strong data governance policies in place, businesses risk data exposure or unauthorized access due to the sharing and accessibility across multiple cloud platforms.

3) Unpredictability

Scalability is the main advantage of a cloud-based infrastructure. Resources can be added indefinitely to handle workload processing demands and reroute data to satisfy user requests. Although data can change in unanticipated ways, one drawback of this kind of transformation is that no security team wants to manage it.

Useful link: Google’s Anthos: The Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Platform That You Need

Best Practices of Multi-Cloud Security

1) Automate End to End Security Processes

Automating your complete security process is one of the best ways to improve multi-cloud security. This increases the significance of your threat detection and incident response methods while reducing costly errors. To maximize automation, find the repetitive, manual operations that can be reduced so your security teams can focus on response and threat analysis.

2) Picking the Right Cloud Vendor

Security starts with picking the right cloud service provider. Selecting the right cloud platform can reduce security concerns because every cloud service is architected differently. AWS, Azure, and GCP are the most reliable and secure cloud providers in the current era. The top three cloud services, AWS, Azure, and GCP, allow MSPs to build and manage resources of any size effectively. As a result, companies can depend on these cloud providers to build secure workloads and robust infrastructure.

3) Encrypt Data

Data encryption is one of the multi cloud security best practices. Cloud-encrypted data is safe and challenging to compromise unless it is decrypted. It’s the best option to encrypt data at rest and in transit while running a cloud-based MSP. Data that has been encrypted and can’t be read it. Due to data’s unreadability and lack of utility, hackers can’t access it even in a data breach.

4) Monitoring

One of the best multi-cloud security plans is constantly monitoring your cloud environment. It is vital to automate monitoring across all cloud environments to stay ahead of any security issues. You can immediately identify problems in your cloud and address them with real-time monitoring.

Conclusion

Adopting a multi-cloud strategy comes with both advantages and challenges. However, the benefits of multi-cloud—such as enhanced flexibility, improved performance, and reduced risk—make it an attractive option for modern businesses. As organizations increasingly deploy multi-cloud security solutions, it is crucial to address potential challenges such as visibility, data governance, and unpredictability.

By following best practices, such as automating security processes, choosing the right cloud vendors, and implementing robust data encryption, businesses can effectively navigate the complexities of multi-cloud security and build secure, resilient cloud infrastructures.

When deploying a multi-cloud security plan, it is essential to partner with experts who understand the intricacies of cloud environments. This is where Veritis comes in. With a team of experienced security professionals, Veritis offers robust tools to safeguard your applications and data across multi-cloud environments. Reach out to us today to ensure your enterprise benefits from a solid and secure multi-cloud strategy.

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Additional Resources:

• 15 AWS Machine Learning Tools in the Cloud
• Selecting a Right Cloud Managed Services Provider (MSP)
• What is Cloud Computing?
• 5 Reasons for successful On-Premises to the Cloud Migration
• Things CTO Needs to Consider Selecting a Cloud Network Security Solution
• What is Security as a Service (SECaaS)?
• Cloud Cost Optimization and Management: Trends, Analysis and Strategy!