Companies are turning to multi-cloud services. Clients want more, which is why businesses need to diversify their offerings. Multi-cloud platforms give them this flexibility but also introduce added security risks. More attack surfaces pop up, and as you use different services, permissions strictures can become complex.
You can’t apply the same rules to one cloud as to another. Since every cloud environment is different, multi-cloud ecosystems function in varied and unique ways. In this guide, we will go over how multi-cloud security works and what you can do if your enterprise is headed in that direction.
What is Multi-cloud Security?
Multi-cloud security is a cloud security solution that protects data across multiple cloud platforms and vendors. It includes private, public, and hybrid clouds such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Multi-cloud security solutions can create complexity and gaps and may cause inefficiencies for organizations migrating to the cloud. Their adoption has accelerated in recent years, and we expect more organizations to improve their multi-cloud security strategy.
Why is Multi-Cloud Security Important?
You can opt for services from multiple cloud service providers when running a business. So multi-cloud security solutions help you protect all these services, including the data that flows between them.
It can prevent business disruptions and outages, enhance customer satisfaction, and ensure that operations remain uninterrupted. Multi-cloud security solutions can also provide multi-cloud backup and disaster recovery planning.
It also changes how multi-cloud service components integrate seamlessly and work together efficiently. This can make your multi-cloud environment much more resilient and adaptive. It also optimizes operating costs and business performance.
Key Components of Multi-Cloud Security
The key components of a multi-cloud security architecture are:
- Zero-trust security: This involves user behavior entity analytics and assessing role-based access control limits. It uses adaptive controls and builds upon a cyberculture of highly precise and verified cloud security.
- Automation: Limiting the risk of human error via security automation. You work on defining what safe system states are and analyze multi-cloud security environments.
- Training: Your organization will decide on the training required to ensure multi-cloud security. You will determine individual roles, maintenance activities, and other aspects here.
Threats to Watch for in Multi-Cloud Environments
Here’s a list of threats to watch out for across multi-cloud environments:
- Data transgression is a huge problem. Attackers may exploit vulnerabilities in one cloud ecosystem to access sensitive data in another. Businesses don’t have total control over their multi-cloud encryption keys.
- Insider threats are also ignored in multi-cloud ecosystems. When working with so many vendors, it can be challenging to track who is causing data leaks. Insiders can hide their tracks much better.
- Advanced persistent threats can install keylogging software and hide activity traces across multi-cloud environments. They can also secretly move and plant malware across multi-cloud networks.
- Multi-cloud supply chain security attacks are another threat to watch out for. Third-party management risks, policy violations, and compliance gaps exist. Organizations that use open-source security tools and services in multi-cloud ecosystems will also introduce many open-source software vulnerabilities.
- It is common to use AI-based threats in multi-cloud environments. Threat actors can launch stealth attacks and invade multi-cloud spaces to cause data breaches.
4 Key Aspects of Multi-Cloud Security
Four cardinal points guide us in the labyrinth of Multi-cloud Security: Identity and Access Management (IAM), Data Protection, Threat Detection and Management, and Compliance and Governance. Each plays a crucial role in safeguarding your digital assets in the multi-cloud universe.
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Identity and Access Management
IAM functions as the gatekeeper in the multi-cloud environment. It controls who gets access to what, ensuring only authorized individuals can access specific resources. This mechanism is as intricate as it is vital. It encompasses a variety of components, such as:
- Authentication: Verifying the identity of a user before granting access.
- Authorization: Defining user privileges, determining what actions a user can perform, on which resource, and under what circumstances.
- Federation: A method that links and uses the identity data from different security domains.
- Privileged Access Management: Controls critical systems and restricts access to only those necessary.
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Data Protection
Data protection is the armor that shields your data when it’s at rest or in transit across multiple clouds. It’s like the safety harness when you’re navigating tricky terrains. Various protective measures include:
- Encryption: Converting data into an unreadable format to prevent unauthorized access.
- Backup and recovery: Safeguarding data by creating copies stored at different locations and the ability to restore it if necessary.
- Data loss prevention: Strategies to ensure unauthorized users do not manipulate or access data.
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Threat Detection and Management
Threat detection and management are akin to your security radar and response team in the multi-cloud environment. It’s about spotting potential dangers and neutralizing them swiftly. Key aspects include:
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM): It combines SIM (security information management) and SEM (security event management) to provide real-time analysis of security alerts.
- Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS): IDS monitors network traffic for suspicious activities, while IPS prevents detected threats.
- Endpoint detection and response: This cyber security approach continuously monitors and responds to potential threats in your network.
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Compliance and Governance
Delving into the multifaceted world of multi-cloud security, compliance, and governance emerge as the guiding beacons, ensuring adherence to all necessary regulations and policies. This segment is all about sticking to the code of conduct, encompassing:
- Regulatory Compliance: Compliance with all pertinent laws, guidelines, and regulations germane to your enterprise.
- Risk Assessment: Recognizing, assessing, and prioritizing threats to fulfill regulatory norms.
- IT Governance: A blueprint ensures that IT ventures back up their business objectives.
How Multi-Cloud Security Works?
Multi-cloud security combines and secures technologies provided by multiple cloud service providers. It reduces fragmentation, improves visibility, and protects the data users share across these environments. It aims to provide consistent risk management and offers organizations great flexibility, cost savings, and access to different services and capabilities. You can view the health of your services and apps from a unified console, solve navigational challenges, and address multiple security concerns from one place.
Benefits of Implementing Multi-Cloud Security
Multicloud security offers multiple benefits. For example, you get the best of each cloud and can match specific features and capabilities to optimize your workloads. The geographical location, security and compliance requirements, speed, performance, reliability, and scalability don’t matter since multicloud security factor all those in. You don’t have to worry about vendor lock-in periods.
With a multi-cloud approach, you’re not tied down to any specific cloud service provider. You get greater interoperability, and all your cost issues are addressed, mainly when you rely on multiple cloud solutions. You can lower your TOC and combine the best pricing policies across different service providers.
Multicloud security prepares your enterprise for unplanned downtimes and outages. Since there is no risk of a single point of failure, an outage in one service or cloud won’t disrupt other services in other clouds.
Your computing needs will be routed to different clouds, and multi-cloud security strategies enable you to deploy and scale workloads while consistently implementing the latest and best security policies and compliance technologies across all of them.
You can improve your business offerings without being limited to the choices offered by a single cloud service provider. This makes managing multiple security services much easier and smoother.
Challenges of Securing Multi-Cloud Environments
The main challenges of securing multi-cloud environments are:
- Every cloud provider implements its management tool interfaces and services. These need to offer a clear, unified view, which makes it difficult for security teams to spot vulnerabilities. A lack of consistent visibility across platforms is an ongoing issue with multi-cloud environments.
- Data protection within multi-cloud environments is becoming increasingly complicated. An ongoing challenge is ensuring this data is protected adequately across multiple clouds. Compliance with regulations also increases complexity. Regulations can change yearly, and organizations can need help meeting emerging compliance requirements.
- Cross-cloud data transfers are another challenge. Data delivery between multiple cloud providers also increases security risks, including data exposure risks during transit.
- There is also the possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks or accidental data leaks. Cloud providers have their own identity and access management systems, which are difficult to integrate with your existing multi-cloud security solutions.
- Another challenge is increasing fragmentation and needing consistent access controls to your multi-cloud infrastructure. Multiple IAM systems can also increase the risk of multi-cloud misconfiguration.
- The next challenge is multi-cloud security monitoring and incident response. You can use different multi-cloud monitoring tools, and your practices can vary from provider to provider; achieving complete security coverage can be difficult. You may also face challenges coordinating your multi-cloud security and incident response efforts across different platforms.
Best Practices for Multi-Cloud Security
Here are the best multi-cloud security practices:
- Start using single sign-on. Single sign-on creates a streamlined authentication process. It will grant your users access to multiple cloud services safely and securely. You can reduce the chance of unauthorized access and not compromise their credentials. Just consolidate authentication processes into a single secure system.
- Add multifactor authentication and implement it across all your multi-cloud environments to add extra layers of protection. It’s also a good idea to conduct regular reviews and audits.
- Fix outdated permissions, remove dormant accounts, and maintain the same level of security across all your cloud environments.
- Use data loss prevention tools and prevent data leaks. Enforce the best data handling policies and practices to get visibility into your multi-clouded data usage.
- Check your encryption standards and keys. Ensure your keys are regularly rotated—encryption protocols like RSA secure data in transit and at rest.
Multi-Cloud Security Strategies for Enterprises
Adopting a multi-cloud security strategy can improve your organization’s business performance and raise security benchmarks. Here are the most popular multi-cloud security strategies being currently employed by modern enterprises:
- Unifying security frameworks: Organizations are working on fixing disparate tools, services, and multi-cloud security silos. They are focusing on connecting better and unifying security frameworks.
- Applying zero-trust architecture access controls: Trust nobody, verify everyone. Enterprises are working on reducing unauthorized multi-cloud data access. Role-based access controls and IAM platforms enabled with adaptive access policies are the key highlights in this area.
- AI threat detection and incident response: Organizations are switching to AI threat detection and incident response. They are revamping their multi-cloud security strategy by incorporating deep learning neural nets for security automation. Real-time SIEM solutions enable them to ingest and analyze data from multiple clouds. Enterprises also implement automated playbooks and workflows that streamline their multi-cloud security actions and responses.
Multi-Cloud Security with SentinelOne
SentinelOne gives you all the tools you need to adapt and implement a multi-cloud security strategy for your organization. Singularity™ Platform offers integrated enterprise security, while Purple™ AI accelerates security operations with generative AI. Singularity Endpoint provides autonomous prevention, detection, and response. It can block attacks with an AI-powered synapse. Protect your identities and user credentials and ensure the regular rotation of secrets with Singularity Identity. Singularity™ XDR can extend your threat defenses and endpoint protection.
SentinelOne also manages your AI security posture and comes with an AI-SIEM for the autonomous SOC.
You can also protect your Amazon S3 and NetApp cloud storage buckets, perform application and OS vulnerability management and scanning, and seamlessly integrate and ingest data from on-premises cloud and hybrid environments with Singularity Data Lake for log analytics.
SentinelOne’s unique Offensive Security Engine with Verified Exploit Paths you stay one step ahead of threat actors and adversaries. You can think from their perspective and remediate potential vulnerabilities, thus letting you predict future attacks and prevent them.
Storylines technology also generates and collects telemetry data and threat intelligence and can map out correlations between security events. It can also help you fight fileless attacks, malware, phishing, social engineering, and cyber threats.
SentinelOne can scan user behaviors across your multi-cloud networks and spot anomalies. It can detect insider threats and implement or recommend the best cyber hygiene practices.
It will also recommend the best multi-cloud security training programs for your employees and put your multi-cloud data to work.
You can eliminate various multi-cloud security risks, eliminate data silos, and watch your multi-cloud enterprise ecosystems come together.
Book a free live demo today to find out more.
Conclusion
Now that you are aware of how multi-cloud security works and the steps and procedures involved in securing these environments, you can make informed security decisions. It’s okay to scale up, but pay attention to security.Multi-cloud security solutions are a great way to secure your future. If you want to improve your multi-cloud security strategy or want accurate assessments, try SentinelOne today.
FAQs
1. What is Multi-Cloud Security?
Multi cloud security is a combination of security products, processes, technologies, tools and user practices designed to secure multi cloud environments. Multi-cloud environments combine public, private, and hybrid clouds, and multi-cloud security refers to the workflows and products used to secure them.
2. Multi-Cloud Security vs. Single-Cloud Security
The difference between multi-cloud security and single-cloud security is that multi-cloud is designed for multiple users and multiple cloud ecosystems, while single-cloud security is restricted to a single cloud and does not incorporate integrations, third parties, or outside elements.
3. How to Ensure Compliance in Multi-Cloud Environments?
You can ensure compliance in multi-cloud environments by using a solution like SentinelOne.
It will help you adhere to the strictest industry regulatory standards and prevent policy violations. It will also adapt to the latest benchmarks and rules that are issued or imposed by different states so that you’re always compliant.
4. Role of Identity Management in Multi-Cloud Security
The role of identity management in multicloud security is to scan all users across multiple cloud environments. It actively searches and finds dormant accounts and eliminates any hidden malicious activities. Identity management also aims to secure your multicloud credentials, ensure regular rotation of secrets, andensuree that all your multi-cloud identities are safe, secure, compliant, and not at risk of any privacy violations.
5. Future of Multi-Cloud Security
The future of multi-cloud security will move towards the evolution of observability tools, DevOps security and robust security solutions. Open standards are going to facilitate more seamless integrations. There will be an emergence in containers and serverless computing solutions being used more in multi-cloud environments. AI and deep learning will continue to automate multi-cloud security tasks and activities like vulnerability scanning, patch management, and threat detection. This will improve multi-cloud security efficiency, reduce human error, and speed up incident response times.
6. Can multi-cloud environments comply with data protection regulations?
Yes, multi-cloud environments can comply with data protection regulations. SentinelOne isan excellentt example of this.
7. Are multi-cloud environments more vulnerable to cyberattacks?
Yes, multi-cloud environments are more vulnerable to cyber attacks because of the expanding attack surfaces. More clouds mean more opportunities for threat actors to exploit vulnerabilities from various angles and systems.
8. What industries benefit the most from multi-cloud security?
All industries benefit the most from multi-cloud security solutions. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in agriculture, education, technology, business, or even finances; your organization will benefit from implementing the latest multi-cloud security solutions.