5 Tips to Secure an Enterprise Multi-Cloud Environment 

Before signing on with a new cloud provider, organizations that use a multi-cloud environment must ensure that their cloud security policies and governance are in sync. Ensure that your security standards are up to par — and conversely, that the provider has the necessary procedures to protect your confidential data. When synchronizing your security policies and governance, consider factors such as setting access controls, monitoring security logs, and encrypting data both at rest and in transit.

Cloud computing has become a best practice for companies of all sizes and industries—and what’s more, the nature of the cloud is becoming increasingly complex over time. Cloud security has been a significant concern for companies in recent years.

With most businesses embracing multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud strategies, how can they secure this larger attack surface? In this article, we’ll discuss the steps companies need to take for cloud infrastructure security with a multi-cloud setup, from improving policies to training cloud security.

What is a Multi-Cloud Environment?

As the name suggests, a multi-cloud environment uses multiple cloud computing services as part of an integrated whole. This kind of cloud strategy relies on two or more cloud service providers to meet an organization’s computing needs. For example, a company might use one cloud provider for storing data, another for its computing resources, and a third provider for running specific software applications.

Businesses use multi-cloud environments for various reasons, including:

• Resiliency: Distributing cloud resources across multiple providers can improve your IT environment’s resiliency, stability, and uptime. For example, if one provider suffers unexpected downtime, requests can be routed to another provider until service is restored.
• Cost: Each cloud service provider has its pricing model, and some providers are cheaper at providing certain products and services than others. Using a multi-cloud setup lets customers pick and choose the most cost-effective solution for each workload.
• Features and functionality: The best cloud service providers may offer specific features and functionality that are unavailable from other providers. For example, cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud each offer their version of artificial intelligence and machine learning services.
• Avoiding vendor lock-in: Vendor lock-in can grow to be a serious issue over time organizations want to switch cloud providers, but it has become too cost-prohibitive to perform the migration. Using a multi-cloud setup helps avoid vendor lock-in by using different options and never fully committing to a single one.

Despite the many advantages of an enterprise multi-cloud environment, there are also potential drawbacks and concerns. For one, multi-cloud setups are inherently more complex, requiring users to integrate the various platforms and services they use across different providers.

In particular, multi-cloud environments can lead to concerns about cloud infrastructure security. Using multiple cloud providers might seem inherently riskier than using one since the odds are more significant that an attacker will break into any of them.

Fortunately, as we’ll see in the next section, several techniques to secure your multi-cloud environment exist.

5 Ways to Secure a Multi-Cloud Environment

While cloud infrastructure security is always a crucial concern, it is essential for multi-cloud environments. Below, we’ll go over five critical methods for boosting the security of a multi-cloud setup.

1. Synchronize Policies and Governance with the Cloud Provider

Before signing on with a new cloud provider, organizations that use a multi-cloud environment must ensure that their cloud security policies and governance are in sync. Ensure that your security standards are up to par — and conversely, that the provider has the necessary procedures to protect your confidential data. When synchronizing your security policies and governance, consider factors such as setting access controls, monitoring security logs, and encrypting data both at rest and in transit.

2. Integrate Security into DevOps

DevOps is an IT best practice that involves close collaboration between an organization’s development and operations teams, uniting people, processes, and technology across the enterprise. When the security team is included in this integration, the result is DevSecOps (development, security, and operations). In addition, DevSecOps involves automated security tests at each stage of the development lifecycle, ensuring that the final product is free from bugs and security vulnerabilities. DevSecOps team members may also engage in cloud security training to better understand the challenges, risks, and opportunities they face in a multi-cloud setup.

3. Examine Your Deployment Strategies

When securing a multi-cloud setup, organizations also need to consider how they deploy to these different environments, potentially tailoring their approach to each one. Businesses may wish to use a different deployment strategy for each cloud provider, ensuring that both parties have enacted the necessary security policies to defend against cyberattacks.  A robust cloud deployment strategy may include components such as containerization, network segmentation, and firewalls to help isolate workloads and limit the impact of a security breach.

4. Use a Single Dashboard

A multi-cloud environment is inherently more complex than a single cloud, so any way to simplify this complexity should be welcome. One way to do so is by using a dashboard that allows organizations to manage and monitor all their cloud providers at a glance. In addition, this dashboard should provide visualizations such as charts, graphs, and plots to help users understand the goings-on in their multi-cloud environment, including potential security events, which helps organizations identify and respond to security issues more quickly.

5. Automate the Security Process

Last but not least, your multi-cloud security process should include as much automation as possible. Automation is a crucial practice in both DevOps and DevSecOps, helping improve deployment speeds and reduce the potential for human error. Tools such as security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms can help introduce automation to a multi-cloud environment and lower the risk of oversights, freeing up IT personnel to focus on more complex issues.

How the C|CSE Helps with Security Practices for Multi-Cloud Environments

Although a multi-cloud setup does present specific concerns about cloud infrastructure security, the good news is that you can take steps to allay these concerns. Following those mentioned above, the five best practices above and going through cloud security training can dramatically lower the risk of a cyberattack or other security event in your multi-cloud environment.

EC-Council’s C|CSE (Certified Cloud Security Engineer) program gives students the real-world skills and tools they need to work in the rapidly growing field of cloud security.

The C|CSE is a vendor-neutral and vendor-specific course, making it ideal for multi-cloud environments. It focuses on developing the right combination of theoretical and practical skills, cloud security practices, technologies, frameworks, and principles.

Ready to get started? Learn more about EC-Council’s C|CSE certification and start your cloud security training today.