Picture this: An object storage misconfiguration has left thousands of customer records fully exposed. Your company is about to face costly compliance consequences and a loss of customer trust. How should you respond? More importantly, how could a secure hybrid cloud strategy have helped prevent such an incident from happening in the first place?
As IT teams face significant pressure to develop successful digital transformation strategies, organizations are treating security as an afterthought in the rush migrate to the cloud. Today, 81 percent of organizations have a multicloud strategy, according to RightScale. Migration to the cloud or developing cloud apps without a robust hybrid cloud security strategy can significantly increase the complexity, costs and risks of adoption.
When Digital Transformation Is Disastrous
Too often, security is forgotten in the excitement to capture the cloud’s remarkable potential. Perceptions that secure processes can slow digital transformation can lead to security being treated as an afterthought. While effectively managed cloud adoption can improve data security and disaster recovery, many organizations are wary of public cloud providers’ shared responsibility models, which can increase the complexity of governing compliance, access and users compared to premises-based deployments. A Cybersecurity Insiders survey found that 43 percent of cloud adopters lack of visibility into infrastructure security, 38 percent report compliance troubles and 35 percent struggle to consistently enforce security policies.
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Misconfigured cloud servers and other improperly configured systems were solely responsible for the exposure of 2 billion data records tracked by IBM X-Force researchers last year. In addition, inadvertent insider error has contributed to an over 400-percent year-over-year growth in cloud security risks, due in large part to misunderstandings about shared responsibility models to protect data in the cloud. Ultimately, if a data breach or disruption occurs, the organization is liable for the loss of customer trust, regulatory fines and other expensive consequences.
By rushing cloud adoption, business are more likely to generate risks than gain a competitive advantage. In fact, 74 percent of organizations reported that they likely experienced a data breach in the past year due to a lack of secure digital transformation processes. Secure cloud design, a full understanding of responsibility models and solutions for proactive risk management are critical to realizing cloud benefits.
How to Adopt Hybrid Cloud With Confidence
The organization’s ability to develop a successful digital transformation strategy depends, in part, on the IT team’s ability to effectively manage competing priorities of speed, cost efficiency and security. Across industries, hybrid cloud adoption is a necessary tool to balance expanding workloads and data assets. As cloud threats increase, managing multicloud infrastructures requires the enterprise to develop new processes and adopt new solutions for visibility and control.
Strive for True Multicloud Visibility
To holistically understand cloud opportunities and risks, IT leaders need solutions that act as a single pane of glass into an expanding multicloud architecture. Hybrid cloud environments can host a wide array of resources and application programming interfaces (APIs), which makes orchestration challenging.
The need for visibility necessitates management solutions designed to capture a diverse view of storage, networking and provisioning activities across public and private cloud environments. Cloud security services should offer visibility and analytics to proactively manage compliance, identify threats and accelerate remediation activities.
Proactively Manage the Cloud Life Cycle
Effective data governance in a multicloud infrastructure requires comprehensive security policies that are consistently enforced across apps, services, databases, users and endpoints. Cloud security tools should support the organization’s transition to a Secure DevOps model to scan apps for vulnerabilities and simplify the process of access management, authentication and authorization in native and migrated cloud apps. To manage threats and compliance risks, organizations need solutions that automate policy enforcement and strengthen compliance posture in a hybrid cloud environment post-deployment.
Why the Enterprise Is Responsible for Protecting Customer Trust in the Hybrid Cloud
The revolution toward a digital economy is underway, and organizations recognize the potential of the hybrid cloud to introduce agility and scale. As IT teams face pressure to deploy a multicloud infrastructure that supports digital transformation activities, many are rushing to the cloud without a comprehensive approach to protecting critical data by design and default.
To fully realize the potential benefits of the secure hybrid cloud, organizations must accept full responsibility for protecting customer trust in multicloud environments. Implementing secure processes during migration and adoption can reduce the costs and risks that result from treating security as an afterthought. Cloud security services for visibility and orchestration are a necessity to proactively manage policy, compliance and access across cloud apps and services.
Learn more about how to secure your hybrid cloud
The post Succeed in Your Digital Transformation With a Secure Hybrid Cloud Strategy appeared first on Security Intelligence.
