Whether by small measures or by large adoptions, nearly every organization today has onboarded some kind of cloud technology over the last two decades. And as adoption increased, so did the cloud’s sophistication and capabilities. Today, many businesses have opted for multiple clouds—for multiple reasons.
A multi-cloud environment can give an organization significant computing power, flexibility, and scalability, but it can also come with a few challenges that can create inefficiencies and vulnerabilities if not manage properly. Here are a few of these hurdles and ways to jump them.
Develop a Security Strategy that Includes Robust Policies
Security policies are a vital component of your security strategy overall, but they also help manage multi-cloud environments. They should be customized for various use cases and also developed to make sure each of your clouds has the same settings. When you enforce security policies across all your cloud environments, you not only close points of potential exposure, you also simplify security operations. Make sure your policy defines cloud ownership, authentication, cloud migration protocols, threat modeling, a response plan for attack types, and more.
Don’t Get Too Tool-Happy
There’s a tendency in multi-cloud environments to onboard multiple management tools to secure and maintain the clouds, but this can result in tool sprawl which complicates IT’s job and makes for inefficiencies. When you’re shopping for a tool, make sure to look for feature parity in that tool with all the cloud providers you use in your environment. That way, you’ll acquire tools that work across clouds and provide a level of consistency and standardization among them.
Make a Plan
Your team needs to have the appropriate skill sets to manage your cloud providers, so before you onboard another cloud, make sure you have the right talent. You’ll also want to use these skilled IT folks to roadmap a plan so everyone is on the same page about how the multiple clouds will be managed.
Embrace Security Automation
Manual ways of managing alerts in your environment are not going to cut it in a multi-cloud scenario. You should run cybersecurity scans regularly so you can detect threats in as close to real-time as possible. Doing so manually would either be an impossible drag on your existing IT department or would require you to hire lots of new people. Using automation solves this problem.
Security process automation uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect, investigate, and address security threats. It also allows you to consolidate your data so IT isn’t spending time addressing alerts that turn into nothing. Through automation, IT can rapidly, effectively respond to high-priority threats and eliminate alert fatigue.
Remember to Backup and Archive
Just like on-premise resources, your cloud resources should be backed up from cloud to cloud to prevent data loss in the event of a disaster. You’ll have higher reliability, better business continuity, and faster disaster recovery this way—with little disruption to your business.
Standardize Your Cloud Consumption
Your business units and departments might be using your multiple clouds in different ways—procuring services through different channels. This scenario can complicate cloud management for IT. Consider standardizing your consumption through self-service tools that give buyers a centralized place from which to compare and purchase cloud services.
Manage Your Multi-Cloud Environment with Help from the Experts
If you have questions about how to proceed with cloud adoption, how to secure your cloud environment, or what the right next step is for your business on your cloud journey, reach out to Point Alliance. We have deep experience helping organizations onboard the best-fit technologies to modernize their operations, and we can make sure your cloud is working for you. Get in touch with us today.
