Many organizations struggle with security in multi-cloud and hybrid environments. It’s not easy. Every cloud platform is complex, and they all have different tools and controls. Platform and security teams have their hands full learning each provider’s nuances and toolsets. The job only gets harder as cloud environments expand and become even more complicated.
Addressing the complexities of modern cloud environments requires proactive risk management, an enhanced compliance posture, and advanced zero trust cloud practices. By asking some key questions, you can better understand how your team is currently managing risk and compliance across your multi-cloud estate and gain insight into where you need to focus. Strengthening security and governance starts with asking the right questions - use this list as a guide.
»1. How are you proactively addressing security vulnerabilities in your cloud environments?
Proactive risk management is about ensuring you have the platforms and processes in place to prevent breaches from occurring. Too often, many platform and security teams don’t realize a security vulnerability exists in their cloud environments until it is too late. Manual infrastructure deployments are often the root cause of unknown vulnerabilities and force organizations into a reactive security posture.
»2. How do we know every cloud environment we build meets our standards?
Human error is a big cause of security problems in the cloud. Native cloud vendor tools offer limited visibility, making it challenging to enforce consistent configuration best practices across various cloud environments. And using vendor-specific portals to manually provision resources is slow and often leads to misconfigurations, which is one of the leading causes of breaches in the cloud.
»3. How do we enforce the same security policies across different cloud providers?
Every cloud platform has nuances. Each one employs its own set of security controls and protocols, which makes it a challenge to enforce policies consistently across multiple clouds and hybrid environments.
»4. How much time do we spend on manual security processes to protect our cloud environments?
Manual processes slow down response times to threats and often force organizations into a reactive mode. Also, if important security upkeep processes like credential rotations are manual, operators are less likely to do them in a timely fashion, creating more risk. With the right tools, many security processes can be automated, which lowers the risk of human error, lowers the burden on security teams, and reduces the response time to attacks.
»5. What stops a developer from provisioning and accessing whatever infrastructure resources they want?
Speed and convenience are important for developers. The last thing they want is to get bogged down filling out ticket requests for infrastructure every time they need a new environment. It’s much easier to manually provision and configure resources themselves. But allowing them to do that without guardrails has both cost and security consequences.
»6. How do we make sure only approved templates are used to build cloud environments?
Using pre-built templates and images is a fast way to provision infrastructure. However, if the templates are not tested and validated, they could create vulnerabilities and cause cloud environments to fail compliance audits. And if the templates aren’t easy to find in a central repository, or there’s not a menu within workflows so that engineers can only use pre-approved templates, then the templates might not be used.
»7. How do we monitor our cloud environments to ensure they are secure?
Without security solutions that provide a single system of record and centralize audit trails across multiple clouds, teams end up with fragmented vendor-specific data sources that require additional tools to correlate data. This fragmented visibility makes it harder to quickly see how security controls and settings are applied across cloud environments, which can lead to conflicting controls, vulnerabilities, and blind spots.
»8. How do we prevent cloud environments from falling out of compliance over time?
The longer cloud environments exist, the more likely they are to change. Configuration drift is common, and if it's not identified and mitigated, it can open up vulnerabilities or cause infrastructure to fall out of compliance.
»9. What happens if we have to comply with a new regulation or security standard?
New threats drive new regulations. If teams provision infrastructure manually or lack centralized governance controls like policy as code, it’s hard to ensure environments stay compliant.
»10. How do we protect against a threat actor stealing credentials and using them?
Stolen credentials are a top cause of breaches. Without identity-based access controls and secrets management, sensitive data stored in plaintext is vulnerable.
»11. What is our process for managing secrets across our hybrid cloud environments?
Without a centralized way to manage, rotate, and audit secrets, organizations face secrets sprawl and can’t reliably assess or control risk.
»12. How can we streamline our compliance audit process across our cloud environments?
A lack of visibility across cloud environments and manual audit-logging practices can complicate maintaining and proving compliance. Shifting compliance left by building and deploying infrastructure that is secure by default and using a centralized system of record with automated audit-logging can reduce the risk of failed audits.
»13. How do we lower the risk of unauthorized access to data?
If your team is not using identity-based access management systems with granular controls, along with good secrets management practices and effective encryption techniques, you could be at a higher risk of having data stolen, leaked, or losing sensitive information.
»14. What happens if a bad actor intercepts our data?
Data is always at risk — whether it is static or moving. Encryption, format preservation, data masking, and tokenization are some of the ways to safeguard data across cloud environments. Encrypted data, even if it’s stolen, is useless without a way to crack the encryption.
»15. How do we make sure our security processes scale as our infrastructure grows?
Manual processes don’t scale well. As your cloud environments grow, they become more complex and difficult to manage. The more dependent you are on manual processes to manage infrastructure, security, or governance and compliance enforcement, the harder it will be for you to scale your business in a safe, secure way.
»Mitigating multi-cloud risk
Complexity, fragmented visibility, and inconsistent governance practices cause many of the security problems in multi-cloud and hybrid environments. To mitigate risk, organizations should reduce complexity wherever possible, provide platform and security teams a single view of security controls across all cloud environments, and automate workflows using standardized, certified templates and images.
Automation is key. For example, infrastructure as code (IaC) enables you to codify infrastructure configuration and automate the provisioning process. Policy as code lets you integrate security policies and controls into the infrastructure workflow, ensuring policies are automatically applied to all cloud environments. Automated vulnerability and patch management prevents threats from exploiting known problems. Identity-based controls and automated secrets management makes sure access to data is secured. Compliance is maintained by automating audit logging and security monitoring.
You can’t eliminate all cloud risk. But you can mitigate it through standardization and strong governance. Understanding where you are today is the first step.
For deeper insights, watch our video on 10 questions to strengthen your cloud security posture.
»Do cloud right
The Infrastructure Cloud from HashiCorp eliminates complexity and uncertainty in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud security and governance, giving you control, consistency, and confidence. You can simplify infrastructure provisioning, ensure security controls and policies are always present and enforced, and monitor environments for compliance for your multi-cloud estate — all from one centralized, unified platform.
By enhancing your security posture and automating key steps in the provisioning and monitoring processes, The Infrastructure Cloud helps you lower the risk of outages, data breaches, fines, and financial losses, enabling your organization to scale with confidence and create more opportunities for growth and innovation.
To learn more about how The Infrastructure Cloud from HashiCorp can help you strengthen security and governance for your multi-cloud environments, visit hashicorp.com/infrastructure-cloud.
