Cloud computing has undoubtedly broadened the horizons of opportunities for business leaders that strive to scale and offer excellent user experience. However, as more and more organizations incline towards multi-cloud, certain security challenges about multi-cloud and multi-geo deployments may hinder overall growth.
And failing to incorporate multi-cloud cybersecurity practices could tarnish a brand image in the global marketplace and eventually entitle businesses to hefty fines since global data privacy and security regulations are becoming more stringent.
Hence, c-suite leaders must put their best foot forward in revamping their multi-cloud and multi-geo cybersecurity. Let’s look at some common cloud challenges and how businesses thinking to leverage the cloud could reinforce their cloud cybersecurity posture.
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A Brief Overview of Multi-Cloud and Multi-Geo Cloud Architecture
Multi-cloud architecture is when an enterprise leverages cloud computing services from two or more cloud vendors to store data or to run their applications.
Multi-cloud architecture is best suited for ensuring availability and avoiding lag or creating secure backups of sensitive data, including customer and business information.
On the other hand, a multi-geo architecture refers to the use of cloud services that are located in different geographic regions. This can be done to comply with data localization/sovereignty laws, reduce latency, or increase redundancy.
Many organizations use both architectures or either of them depending on their individual needs. But many of them aren’t aware of specific challenges associated with these.
Let’s dig deeper into this and understand the challenges and what enterprises need to know.
Understanding the Risks
We all know that moving to the cloud is super flexible, and the entire process works like a breeze. But what most of us aren’t aware of is the fact that specific data privacy and security challenges can push a business into severe trouble.
Whether the multi-cloud or multi-geo deployment, a little loophole in planning the move to the cloud could eventually entitle the company to hefty fines, and it can even pose a threat to sensitive customer information.
And when we talk about data breaches or privacy breaches, both these architectures increase a business’s total attack surface area. Cybercriminals can have multiple entry points to steal your business data or customer information since data is stored at various locations/physical servers.
Moreover, these cloud architectures don’t have one source for security policies and thus, handling identity and access management becomes an uphill battle for security teams.
Business leaders that don’t priortize cloud security in the initial phase of deployment are always at risk since cybercriminals are constantly exploring new ways to exploit customer data for financial benefits.
Hence, adequate security planning before adopting cloud computing becomes the need of the hour. Let’s look at some aspects of multi-cloud security and how businesses can overcome the challenges of data breaches and identity thefts over cloud deployments.
Establishing Standard Policies and Procedures
Now, one of the biggest questions is- how business leaders could put their right foot forward in response to multi-cloud and multi-geo cybersecurity threats.
Initially, leaders need to begin with an audit of their surface area to get a clear picture of the environments in which their business is operating. And the next step is to catalog various data privacy regulations and standards suitable for the organization based on multiple parameters, including geographic location.
For those operating outside their country and serving the citizens of another country/state, they must ensure they adhere to the data localization policies of that particular country/state to meet compliance and provide robust security.
Also, most countries have their own data regulations and privacy rules. And if a business serves customers in their countries, they must comply with their data privacy and security laws. These include the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA.
Once a business complies with all these data privacy and security regulations and data localization norms, the next step is to incorporate stringent security measures through cutting-edge technologies and tools.
Reinforcing Cloud Security through Latest Tools and Technologies
As a business leader or a security officer, you must plan your move to the cloud by considering adequate security through the latest tools and technologies.
Whether it’s multi-factor authentication or access control, everything must be in place to ensure customer information in a distributed cloud environment remains safe.
Furthermore, adaptive authentication could also be a game-changer for robust cloud security since it helps maintain the highest level of authentication security in high-risk situations, especially in geo-fencing.
These security features can be pretty helpful for securing customer identities and sensitive business information since attackers can’t bypass these multiple layers of security.
To Conclude
With the rapid cloud adoption, businesses are scaling their growth. However, it has also broadened the threat vector.
And hence, several multi-cloud cybersecurity practices are becoming crucial before moving to the cloud to ensure businesses avoid the cybersecurity challenges of multi-cloud and multi-geo architectures.
