A multi cloud security allows organizations to deploy workloads across multiple cloud platforms, including both public clouds, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, and private clouds. This provides much more flexibility than working with only one cloud platform, allows organizations to better manage costs and avoid vendor lock in, and improves resiliency.
However, the high complexity of multi cloud deployments also increases the attack surface and the risk of cyberattacks, raising new cloud security concerns. Multi cloud security requires a holistic approach that addresses diverse security vulnerabilities and establishes consistent security controls across multiple, heterogeneous environments.
Lets Speak about Advantages:
Multi-cloud is definitely one of the preferred strategies in today’s market. Organizations that implement this type of framework do so for numerous reasons, including.
Everyone enjoys choices. And with a multi-cloud architecture, you get to choose from a variety of cloud solutions. This promotes flexibility and prevents a business from having to lock into a specific vendor or contract.
An outage can be disastrous. Even a few minutes of downtime can cost your business thousands of dollars (not to mention damaged reputation). Having multiple cloud environments ensures that you always have alternative resources and data storage on hand and helps avoid downtime.
Challenges
Multicloud adds complexity to your identity and access management efforts. Employees need access to multiple cloud services as part of their daily work, and will access your data from a multitude of locations and devices. Multi-cloud requires a different set of security skills and controls. The emphasis in a multi-cloud environment shifts from securing the perimeter of the network to securing data wherever it is, at rest or on the move. In a multi-cloud environment, organizations need to fully understand data flows and protect them according to their sensitivity.
The enemy of cyber security is complexity. Moving from a single-cloud platform to a multi-cloud platform increases complexity simply because working with multiple cloud providers can be time consuming. Beyond that, with every new platform that is added, there is a learning curve to navigate and each will require ongoing maintenance.
A lack of skilled professionals in the cyber security space adds yet another challenge: finding people with the right skills to choose, configure, secure, and manage a variety of cloud platforms and infrastructures. There is a growing need to connect and integrate the various cloud services so tools and systems can leverage the same data which presents yet another layer of challenge for security teams.
Overcoming the challenges
Be smart about implementing and enforcing policies. Policies should be written once and cover a broad range of topics such as cloud ownership, risk acceptance, and responsibility but standards should be written specifically for each platform. Each security standard should cover how the entire cloud lifecycle, provide plans for centralized management of cloud services, and contain monitoring plans that expand across the multi-cloud environment. Finally, the standards that are created should also be consistent whenever possible.
Maintain consistency with security settings. When two different cloud providers are being used to enable identical operations or support the same tools, the security settings for both providers should be the same. As mentioned above, security standards should be synchronized as well.
Find and deploy the right security tools. If the products you are choosing do not allow you to synchronize security policies, there may be a better choice available. Your security tools must also help maintain compliance across your various platforms.
Conclusion :
MultiCloud computing is one vital component for any DevOps environments. It might not be right for every dev project, but it certainly can work for many of them.
