Multi-cloud security adoption has been skyrocketing over the past few years. In fact, according to Cisco’s 2022 Hybrid Cloud Trends report, 82% of IT leaders have adopted a hybrid cloud, and 58% of organizations use between two and three infrastructure-as-a-service clouds. According to CloudTech Report, 64% of organizations currently use a multi-cloud environment, with 18% actively transitioning to a multi-cloud environment.
Also Read: Top SecOps Tools, Use Cases and Best Practices
What is multicloud security?
Multicloud security is a cloud security solution that provides complete data protection across multiple cloud platforms, including private and public clouds such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Organizations use multi-cloud security to protect all cloud platforms and their various functionalities.
In today’s fast-paced business environment, multicloud adoption is required to survive, where agility and flexibility are important to be competitive. While organizations derive immense benefits from it, the complexity brought in by multicloud environments is bound to introduce security gaps and inefficiencies that prevent organizations from fully benefiting from cloud economics.
To do this successfully, an organization requires a strong multi-cloud security strategy. This article discusses multicloud security architecture, requirements, challenges, and best practices to help an organization optimize its multicloud strategy.
Multi-Cloud Security Architecture
Multi-cloud security architecture secures data and applications in a multi-cloud environment. The architecture typically consists of the following components to build layered defenses in the cloud:
- Centralized Management: Centralized dashboards, reporting, and logging to assist with governance and troubleshooting across disparate environments.
- Core Services: Networking, segmentation, service insertion, and traffic steering.
- Advanced Services: Load balancing, content delivery network (CDN), firewall, web application firewall (WAF), and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA).
- Identity and Access Management (IAM): Controls user and application access to cloud resources with consistent IAM policies across all cloud providers.
- Data Protection: Encrypts data at rest and in transit, with backup and disaster recovery plans to ensure data availability during outages.
- Network Security: Deploys secure network connections and protocols to protect data in transit across different cloud providers.
- API Management: Protects apps and APIs across multi-cloud architectures for responsive and reliable user experiences.
- Compliance and Governance Policies: Ensures organizations meet regulatory requirements and industry standards across all cloud services.
- Threat Detection and Response: Enhance the organization’s security response with controls across different cloud environments for efficient detection and remediation.
- Ecosystem Integrations: Advanced application delivery and security; L7 gateways, automation tools for software development and deployment.
Leading Multi-cloud Security Solutions
#1 Google Cloud
Google Cloud Platform is an award-winning multi-cloud solution that efficiently deploys data and supports modern business endeavors. The platform utilizes serverless computing environments that enable businesses to build and move applications across multiple cloud environments.
Key features:
- Security and compliance control features for sensitive workloads.
- Cloud IDS, cloud asset inventory management and cloud key management.
- Encodes about data being used by confidential VMs and, with HSM, delivers hardware key security.
- Centralized multi-tenant service access at scale, firewall insights, audit logging and cloud-native threat detection.
#2 AWS
Amazon Web Service is a cloud platform that hosts websites, stores data, processes applications, and more. The platform offers a suite of security partners and solutions, including security solutions for networks and applications, data and compliance. Its services include AWS Web Application Firewall, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Shield and AWS Audit Manager.
Features:
Threat detection and continuous monitoring.
Infrastructure protection support.
Identity and access management.
EventBridge alerting with GaurdDuty.
#3 Zscaler
Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange secures cloud workloads in a multi-cloud environment. The platform distributes routes and monitors applications’ real-time performance to boost enterprise security posture.
Offerings:
- Cloud-native protection
- SSL proxy and Advanced threat protection
- Leverages Identity-based micro-segmentation
#4 McAfee
McAfee’s multi-cloud security solution offers personalized and guided protection to organizations. The platform provides protection score checks to determine the enterprise’s security health status and monitors confidential credentials throughout multiple cloud environments. It helps prevent data leakage and breaches.
Key features:
- In-depth reporting and layered protection for analytics.
- Ransomware protection, malware protection, prevention and identity and access management.
- Agentless deployment support by its McAfee McVision Cloud.
#5 Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure enables businesses to deploy applications across multiple cloud environments, which can be public or on-premises. Azure’s multi-cloud security solutions offer security redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities. The platform extends the native capabilities of Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
Key features:
- Integrates to multi-cloud environments via agentless, API-based methods for CSPM insight and offers integrated security from code to cloud.
- Unfies insights for multi-cloud DevOps and multipipeline workflows.
- Identifies cloud security threats in real-time and integrates extended detection and response (XDR) across multi-cloud workloads.
- Incorporates visibility of security posture across Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, and hybrid clouds
#6 PingSafe
PingSafe, a comprehensive cloud-security platform that secures multi-cloud infrastructure from deployment and development. It provides a Cloud-native Protection Platform (CNAPP) to fix cloud misconfigurations before deploying.
Offerings:
- Shift-left security
- Enhanced Kubernetes security
- Agentless vulnerability management
- cloud detection and response
- Real-time secret scanning
#7 Oracle
Oracle’s multi-cloud security platform enables enterprises to combine multiple cloud environments, improve security, optimize cost and boost performance. It facilitates real-time SaaS integration with different applications and helps companies meet data residency and regulatory requirements.
Key features:
- Standard management and operational procedure tools and practices throughout multiple cloud environments.
- Layered security strategy and cloud identity and access management services to secure applications.
- Multi-cloud integration with Oracle cloud ERP, Azure SQL and more.
#8 IBM
IBM’s multi-cloud security platform allows enterprises to securely and effortlessly shift from traditional to multi-cloud infrastructure. The platform protects workloads, helps security teams adopt a shared responsibility model and reduces fragmentation.
Features:
- Its zero-trust security and deep visibility protect multi-cloud environments.
- Constant threat management, discovery and incident response plans across the organization.
- Cloud data encryption key management, secure credentials and classification of critical data risks.
- Cloud IAM services and workload protection.
#9 Netskope
Netskope is a modern security solution provider for multi-cloud environments and offers unique data threat detection as well as remediation capabilities. The platform protects the off-premises workloads and complements original cloud security stacks for Microsoft and Google. It in addtion offers visibility into advanced persistent threats and multi-cloud inventory.
Features:
- Data security: Collect, summarizes and delivers data security insights across GCP, Azure, and AWS deployments.
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP): Builds on DLP profiles to scan Azure blob containers and AWS S3 storage buckets, identifying sensitive information and preventing malware attacks.
- Command-Line Interface (CLI) Monitoring: Uncovers hidden CLI activities and offers inline visibility and controls powered by Cloud XD.
- Shadow IT Prevention: Prevents shadow IT attacks and allows for the creation and implementation of custom security policies across multiple cloud environments.
#10 Bitglass
Bitglass: Total Cloud Security offers comprehensive cloud protection and CSAB-provided encryption. The platform monitors and analyzes incoming and outgoing traffic, detects network anomalies and leverages the combination of proxies to safeguard sensitive credentials and mitigate the risk of data leakage.
Key Features:
- Its Zero-trust Network Access is beneficial for private applications.
- DLP policies and login policies
- Secure Web Gateway for improved web security.
- Advanced threat detection and data security.
Also Read: Top 10 AI Companies for Data Center and Edge
Importance of Multi-cloud Security Strategy
Cyberattacks are serious threats to businesses, damaging their reputation and affecting businesses financially. Data leaks and security breaches also harm the continuity of organizations. With the adoption of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure, these industries are exposed to many risks associated with non-protected cloud environments; these include data loss, unauthorized access, lack of visibility, and increased non-compliance. A single cyberattack may lead to the mistrust of customers, which may come at the cost of the repair of the network and revenue loss.
An effective multi-cloud strategy needs to include a properly working multi-cloud security solution. Here are four benefits of the implementation of multicloud security:
- More Reliability: Multicloud security protects your business assets, ascertaining the safety of your data and the best working conditions for critical applications. It restricts application access to only authorized users, thus avoiding leaking sensitive information.
- Constant Security: A safe cloud environment will continuously monitor cyber threats and exposure risks and timely security updates round the clock.
- Less Cost: Cyber threats might cost your business a lot regarding repair and recovery. Protecting your multicloud environment can save your business from these costly outcomes.
- Centralized Visibility: Multicloud security solutions enable your business to manage cloud security remotely. You can easily monitor application health, assess exposure risks, and manage users’ access effectively.
Multi-cloud Security Complexities
- Visibility: The major challenge in cloud security is visibility, and using multi-cloud strategies further exacerbates it. By using third-party cloud providers, one may be denied access to all layers of the cloud computing stack and, hence, have no clear visibility into all security flaws or vulnerabilities. In addition, though cloud providers offer some monitoring tools, they are mostly incomplete or do not yield sufficient detail about granular logging. In a multi-cloud environment, managing multiple built-in monitoring tools simultaneously becomes impractical.
- Compliance: Compliance with regulatory requirements is another challenge when working with multiple cloud providers. Companies must meet regulatory requirements across all cloud environments. For instance, an organization may be subject to HIPAA compliance requirements, but AWS may have different compliance policies than Azure, leading to potential compliance gaps.
- Information Privacy: Information privacy across diversified cloud environments is another critical challenge. Data must be adequately encrypted in transit and at rest to prevent unauthorized access. Organizations must also implement effective backup and recovery processes to deal with data breaches or losses. For example, a company may use Google Cloud Storage for backup and AWS S3 for primary storage. Still, the different encryption and access control policies across every cloud may complicate consistent protection.
- API security:Â Secure communication over the Internet is possible using API tools and protocols that allow it with web apps, containers and microservices. However, securing APIs still remains a major challenge. According to the SANS report on multi-cloud, for 58.9% of respondents, poorly configured or insecure APIs or interfaces were a top concern. It exposes the application’s back-end logic and sensitive data, projecting them as a prime target for attackers.
- Shared Security Model: In cloud computing, the shared security model means you are responsible for certain security aspects while your provider handles the rest. The division of responsibilities varies between providers, so you cannot assume that every platform in your multi-cloud environment offers the same level of security.
Best Practices for Multi-cloud Security
- Upgrades and Patching: Even between cloud providers, sometimes offering the same infrastructure or workloads, vulnerabilities can change with their respective fixes. Automate software upgrades and patches, making sure they account for the workload, the infrastructure it runs on, and dependencies.
- Monitoring and Visibility: Monitor multi-cloud environments with tools supporting multiple clouds and visibility across the whole environment. Holistic visibility will help detect, investigate, and respond to cyber threats.
- Multi-Cloud Storage: Classify data in a multi-cloud environment by putting sensitive data into the most secure storage resources. Plan the geographical distribution of the data to comply with regulations and implement DLP solutions that detect data loss or exfiltration across multiple clouds.
- Tailor Security Policies to Services: Each workload or application in the multi-cloud must have its security profile and policies based on its use, data sensitivity, and compliance.
- Automate Security: Extend automation to security practices in public clouds. Adopt a DevSecOps approach where every process on your cloud infrastructure considers security. Ensure every new VM or container undergoes relevant security scans.
Future Outlook
The future of multi-cloud security will evolve with ever-changing business and security requirements. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will automate more security tasks, which will now be able to detect and remediate threats with more speed and accuracy. New technologies, including containers and serverless computing, are increasing in the multi-cloud domain and will continue to require dedicated security measures to protect those technologies. As multi-cloud environments become more complex, so does the attack surface, requiring robust and consistent security solutions and policies across all environments, including on-premises, cloud, and edge.
Organizations should look for multi-cloud security providers with a proven track record of successfully implementing and maintaining such solutions. Providers must update their security intelligence and controls regularly to remain aligned with the ever-evolving threat landscape and industry best practices.
FAQs
1. What is the difference between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud?
A hybrid cloud environment combines private and public cloud services, whereas a multi-cloud model includes two or more public cloud services.
2. What are the benefits of multi-cloud?Â
- Agility and responsiveness to drive faster time to market
- Virtually unlimited scalability, allowing to respond to business requests rapidly
- Utilizes the unique strengths of each vendor
3. What is a multi-cloud strategy?
A multi-cloud strategy is an approach to cloud transformation and migration. On a high level, here are three steps to an effective multi-cloud strategy:
- Aligning infrastructure to business needs: ensure that the multi-cloud approach is tailored to the objectives of the business.
- Creating a plan to bridge the gap between current and ideal states: Perform an infrastructure audit, identify gaps, and define a multi-cloud architecture roadmap.
- Measuring progress against the plan: with workloads migrating to different cloud vendors, it’s important to have a multi-cloud management system In place from day one to track all the moving parts.
4. What is the Value proposition for multi-cloud management?
Three pillars to visibility in multi-cloud management:
- Integrated platform
- Detailed analytics
- Comprehensive reporting
5. Key features to look for in a multi-cloud security provider
- Comprehensive visibility across multiple cloud platforms
- Automated security workflows
- Uniform security policies
- Robust identity and access management
- Strong data protection capabilities
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