Many of the organizations are nowadays showing a lot of interest in moving their IT assets to cloud platforms. However, they are stuck up in a dilemma on whether to go for a Multi-Cloud environment or a single cloud environment- especially after taking security factor into account.
Thus, Cybersecurity Insiders would like to bring to your notice a few concepts which will help weigh down the pros and cons of multi-cloud vs. single cloud environments when it comes to security.
Single cloud models often lead to downtime concerns, security and privacy issues and are more vulnerable to attacks and vendor lock-in. Whereas in multi-cloud environments compatibility factor between different platforms might cause certain issues to escalate causing serious concerns on security perspective.
So, organization heads or those in CTO and CIO posts should prepare and look for varied security control options that can work effectively in more than one environment. And the best way to do this is to follow the below steps-
Duty separation- In SMBs single IT teams are involved in devising cloud architectures. While in big companies which are spread geographically or by business units, distinct teams are involved in cloud build. This is where the problem arises on a governance standpoint. Therefore, it is better to decide who is going to do ‘what’ in the building of cloud architecture making a single person in charge of network admin skills.
Deployment of tools and processes- In single cloud architecture, a unified pipeline of tools are created when it comes to security. But in multi-cloud environments, such tools often tend to fail due to implementation and governance challenges. Thus, do keep a watch on it in Multi-cloud architectures.
Network Security- In single cloud architectures, a clear picture of network security is available in the SLA. But in multi-cloud architectures keeping a tab on network security controls is not that easy. Therefore, special skills and tools are required to track down risk profiles in multi-cloud environments and that means more investment will be needed to do so.
Skills required- Having an understanding of your in-house security teams and their capabilities makes sense when you are moving your assets from single to multi-cloud environments. Because, if they fail to understand the layering of security controls in each environment, then it can cause your firm some serious trouble like downtime due to misconfiguration caused by human errors.
On a concluding note, when it comes to security standpoint no environment seems to be safe.
Truthfully, in multi-cloud platforms, more work has to be done when it comes to implementing security controls and more skills will have to be needed to see that the security processes are running smoothly on each cloud environment.
