How to ensure infrastructure and application security across multiple clouds?

To effectively protect these environments, certain measures must be taken during migration. Look what they are!

6 Practical information security tips for users

Migration to Hybrid Multi-Cloud environments has been an essential strategy for companies looking to invest in the digital transformation of their businesses and stay ahead of today’s competitive market.

It offers cost and efficiency benefits, but also makes the management process more complex, requiring more attention and staff resources. This complexity is the result of each cloud having its own siled systems and configuration.

Additionally, with an ever-increasing number of cloud-based applications, companies face new security risks that require often lacking knowledge, which can slow down the implementation and maintenance of a multi-cloud strategy.

Taking this into account, we have prepared this material with important advice so that your customers can have a guarantee of security in their infrastructures and applications in the era of Hybrid Multi-Cloud. Look at it!

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What has changed in multi-cloud infrastructure and application security?

With the adoption of cloud services by multiple vendors, the security perimeter is no longer just the local network, but extends to a multitude of cloud applications used for business-critical workloads.

That’s why companies must be prepared to deal with officials who expect to be able to collaborate and have access to resources anywhere, at any time, using all types of devices.

In this new reality, workloads in one cloud may not be visible to IT operations professionals tasked with protecting workloads in another cloud, making things easier for cybercriminals.

This is because multi-cloud environments provide hackers with a larger attack surface, especially when the company uses multiple public clouds.

Therefore, the more applications running in a company’s cloud, the greater the likelihood of a misconfiguration or data exposure incident.

Therefore, you need to invest in a centralized management and visibility approach to ensure protection and compliance of all applications simultaneously across multiple environments.

Multicloud security is a shared responsibility

Cloud computing security is a shared responsibility between the cloud service provider and its customers. There are basically three categories of responsibilities in the Shared Responsibility Model: there are some responsibilities that are always the supplier’s, others that are always the customer’s, and others that vary depending on the service model used, such as SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

The responsibilities that always fall on the provider are protecting the infrastructure itself, accessing, patching, and configuring the physical hosts and physical network on which the compute instances run and where storage and other resources are hosted.

Customer responsibilities now include managing users and their access privileges to prevent unauthorized access, encrypting and securing cloud-based data assets, and managing regulatory compliance.

Therefore, for businesses to meet all their obligations, it is essential to have a cloud-native solution that offers centralized visibility and granular policy-based control.

How to ensure infrastructure and application security across multiple clouds?

To effectively protect applications across multiple clouds, companies must streamline deployment processes and ensure that network access and security policies are standardized and enforced across clouds.

Furthermore, it is necessary to implement some measures, such as:

Have a common network and security policy.

One of the main challenges for multi-cloud deployments is that cloud providers typically have different proprietary architectures based on frameworks, application programming interfaces (APIs), and toolkits specific to their environment.

Therefore, an effective hybrid multi-cloud solution must provide a common network and security fabric that can span across all clouds used on an ongoing basis.

This requires abstracting cloud-native capabilities with APIs, centralizing management, policy configuration and orchestration, and then dynamically managing cross-cloud connections through automation.

Adopt granular, policy-based identity and access management (IAM) and authentication controls across complex infrastructures

With the right solution, companies can grant only the minimum access privileges to resources and APIs that are essential for a group or function to carry out their tasks.

So, in addition to allowing each user to access only what is necessary for their role, you can require higher levels of authentication for those with greater privileges.

Understand the concept of shared responsibility models.

In addition to prioritizing visibility and centralized management, your organization should consider the concept of shared responsibility from the beginning of the process of migrating applications across multiple clouds.

Determining what the service provider’s duties will be and what will go to internal IT will help teams plan better.

It is crucial to remember that the provider is responsible for protecting the cloud itself, but the company must protect all applications placed in the cloud.

Therefore, you need to ensure that workloads are protected, data is compliant, and access control is managed properly.

Use a next-generation web application firewall (WAF)

The WAF can inspect and control web application server traffic. This is a type of firewall designed to combat threats that are beyond the capabilities of traditional firewalls.

The Web Application Firewall differentiates itself by protecting internal web applications from sophisticated external attacks at the application layer. To do this, it creates a barrier between your web-based service and everything else on the Internet, blocking and protecting applications from criminal actions.

Prioritize access control and cloud governance

Cloud governance is the management of people, processes, and other actions related to the policies and standards of multi-cloud environments.

This requires centralized management teams across multiple clouds to avoid access control failures. Additionally, configuration and deployment control and security policies between clouds must be taken into account.

Therefore, companies should think about prioritizing governance automation over other initiatives such as cost optimization or the use of container technology.

Increase workload and application visibility across deployments

Visibility is a key part of developing a successful hybrid multi-cloud strategy. And while some cloud providers offer network visibility tools, many of them aren’t really effective in multi-cloud ecosystems.

Therefore, the company must ensure that each workload is protected, that no integrations expose sensitive information, and that applications remain available to users.

One way to achieve this is to invest in cloud management platforms designed specifically to manage multiple clouds. They can manage and monitor any resource.

Additionally, they can consolidate information into a central source and provide a single pane of glass to provide visibility into workload protection, components and regulatory compliance.

Multi-cloud environments are here to stay. However, without adequate solutions and strategies, they can present risks that many companies are not prepared for.

This is why companies must update themselves and invest in ideal solutions for this new reality. Only in this way will it be possible to guarantee the protection of your infrastructure and applications from the beginning of the migration to Hybrid Multi-Cloud