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By Michael Rezek

Cloud migration and multi-cloud strategies can introduce blindspots where bad actors can slip in

Ubiquitous visibility critical across the seams of the multi-cloud quilt

For most organizations, the journey to the cloud is well underway. What is not common knowledge is that:

  • Most organizations use an average of 5 federated clouds including public and private
  • The average employee uses at least 8 different apps
  • For companies with more than 1,000 employees, there are more than 200 apps to support
  • Over 90 percent of IT managers regularly deal with Shadow IT
  • In one study, 74% of those who moved an application to the cloud moved it back to their own infrastructure (yikes!)

Not only is the migration of an application to the cloud complex, but the management of multiple cloud environments creates another order of magnitude of complexity. Each cloud requires its own connectivity, security, and offers its own services and APIs. 

Ensuring consistent security for workloads, applications, and data that move across and between different cloud environments becomes next to impossible without ubiquitous visibility across the seams of this quilted cloud landscape.

When it comes to successful security, it is important to understand a couple points about deploying security solutions in the cloud, which is nebulous itself because there are different methods to secure data and applications in the cloud of which organizations should be aware.

Generally speaking, there are two types of cloud security solutions. The first are point solutions designed for on-premises environments that sit on the top of cloud infrastructure. The second are cloud native—built-in cloud solutions designed to take advantage of integrated cloud APIs and services developed by the cloud provider.

When a security solution is integrated with cloud-based services, it can better secure a company. This becomes a challenge for multi-cloud because few solutions can natively integrate across multiple clouds. Additionally, applications themselves are often delivered across cloud seams making it difficult to detect threats in each of these environments. To implement a multi-tiered security approach that traverses the cloud seams requires visibility that observes traffic as it flows from client to each application tier server regardless of the underlying IT infrastructure and its location. 

As the market continues to evolve and organizations attempt to deploy methods and technologies, such as zero trust, CASB, SASE (see our recent blog on Gartner’s SASE, The new network edge: user or device, not the data center), etc., these multi-cloud environments will continue to churn. For the average security team with limited resources, being able to have ubiquitous visibility across all the seams of the entire multi-cloud quilt will become more important.  Security solutions that can place “eyeballs” everywhere regardless of the cloud infrastructure, services, and APIs are critical.

The reality is not only is this distributed, disaggregated multi-cloud infrastructure landscape complex, but applications and their architectures themselves are not static, as they continue to evolve toward an even more disaggregated, non-monolithic architecture leveraging micro-services with RESTful APIs. In such a complex hyper-connected world, simplicity in instrumenting this environment, rather than complexity, will be the difference between success and failure in driving the digital experience outcomes CEOs and their organizations desire.

How do you know if your security posture is sufficient for the threats battling to breach your organization from every angle of the threat surface? Get a complimentary security posture assessment from the experts at Accedian!

Sources:
https://solutionsreview.com/cloud-platforms/74-of-companies-move-apps-to-the-cloud-then-back-on-premise/
https://www.ciodive.com/news/is-multi-cloud-the-answer-most-companies-are-using-up-to-5/517077/
https://martechtoday.com/new-blissfully-report-most-companies-have-orphaned-saas-apps-in-their-stacks-231064
https://www.cio.com/article/3207187/headache-for-the-cio-shadow-it-is-soaring-as-lobs-seek-greater-autonomy.html