Best Practices to Manage Multi-Cloud Environments

The number of enterprises using a multi-cloud deployment model are growing. However, despite increased adoption, the complexity of managing across cloud borders remains a major challenge. Multi-cloud success requires simpler management across mixed-cloud infrastructures.

This piece details the top opportunities and challenges associated with multi-cloud environments and offers recommendations for making them work.

Multi-Cloud Environment Advantages 

• Ensures optimized deployments - resulting in more efficient workloads.
• Helps avoid vendor lock-in -more choice and competition results in lower costs.
• Enables speed – improves development and deployment times.
• Promises flexibility – e.g., business continuity/disaster recovery and business continuity plans may eventually enable multi-cloud failover, high availability and better workload recovery.

Multi-Cloud Environment Challenges 

• Security: It is difficult enough to understand the shared responsibility model for one cloud service provider (CSP), but now organizations must get educated on several.
• Data management and integration: Multi-cloud deployments lack visibility across CSPs, and data and workloads often can’t be moved among environments.
• Cost: Managing multiple CSPs is expensive, especially when it comes to talent and tooling.
• Talent: The skills gap is a major issue, from both a developer and security perspective. Few security teams are proficient in one IaaS environment, never mind all three. Developers (especially AWS developers) tend to lean into what they know as well.
• Tooling: This is where most of the costs come into play. Each CSP has must-have proprietary tools for their own environment, but they don’t work well across multiple clouds. It is difficult to budget for and manage both those and the third-party solutions necessary to really manage and secure multi-cloud deployments.

READ: Assess the Maturity Level of Your Cloud Security Program 

Tips for Multi-Cloud Governance and Compliance 

• Prep for the added compliance complexity inherent with running multi-cloud and hybrid workloads.
• Select a framework that covers the large CSPs and can help manage data privacy (e.g., NIST Cyber Security Framework, NIST 800-53 Rev. 4 or 5, or ISO/IEC 27001).
• Partner with auditors to gain insights for best practices: Don’t wait until the audit. ISO/IEC 27001 is still the best certification to expose current baseline and continuous improvement. It is also a global standard.

Download: Six Key Control Areas of Cloud Security

Key Multi-Cloud Recommendations 

• Understand which offerings are unique to a CSP and necessary for visibility, management and security.
• Augment CSP-specific tools with third-party tools that provide multi-cloud coverage.
• Put a plan in place to improve cross-CSP visibility and security.
• Ensure your identity management tools will cover a multi-cloud deployment.
• Apply a framework with consistent policy and controls.
  

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