Businesses are becoming exposed to the use of multi-cloud systems as a tool to increase operational effectiveness, scalability, and innovation. However, while a multi-cloud strategy is an attractive one, there are bound to be numerous complexities related to its security as well. Overall, multi-cloud is the process of using multiple cloud computing and storage services from different vendors in a single network architecture. This enables companies to distribute their workloads between the various clouds, ensuring that their efficiency and costs are at the best possible level.
Every cloud provider has its own set of rules that the organization needs to follow. This often becomes a difficulty while using multi-cloud because of consistency issues across all platforms. Attack surface increases because of multiple entry points and data transfer. Multi-cloud security helps organizations keep their data, applications, and infrastructure secure in every environment. It implements security measures to maintain compliance and visibility across all the cloud resources.
This blog will explore what multi-cloud security is and what the need for using it is. We will also discuss the challenges that organizations can face during their implementation and how to overcome those with the best practices. We will also learn how SentinelOne can help resolve multi-cloud security challenges.
What is Multi-cloud Security?
Multi-cloud security is what it sounds like, and it is a set of tools, policies, and practices that will help protect data, applications, and infrastructure across different cloud environments. It helps in securing workloads and data that might be present in various cloud service providers used by organizations. These providers can be Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and others.
The main aim of multi-cloud security is to create a central security system for all the cloud environments. This will make sure that there is consistent protection of resources and data, independent of their location.
Multi-cloud security covers different security measures such as:
- Data protection: It helps to protect data from breaches both in the resting stage as well as in the transit stage across all cloud platforms.
- Access control: It provides a central platform to manage user accounts and permissions in one place across multiple cloud environments.
- Threat detection and response: It helps to find the threats and resolve them across multiple cloud environments.
- Compliance management: It helps in making sure that all compliance rules are followed across different cloud providers.
- Network security: Multi-cloud security can be implemented to secure communication between cloud environments and on-premises infrastructure.
Need for Multi-Cloud Security
Due to multi-cloud strategies being adopted on a large scale, it is important to develop security solutions that can protect this complex environment. There are several factors that contribute to the need for this innovation, including the need for business agility and innovation. Additional reasons are the reduction of risks for the organization by sharing workloads across more than one cloud and the optimization of costs and service delivery by choosing the best providers and services.
The volume of sensitive data that organizations store on clouds has never been this large before. As a result, it is important that data protection is implemented. Another issue organizations might face is the existing and future international and national regulations of data protection and privacy. According to the 2024 State of Multicloud Security report, 80% of enterprises have already adopted a multi-cloud security strategy! There were 59 multi-cloud data security incidents this year and more than half of organizations are exposed to at least one attack path. Enterprises also need to navigate multi-cloud compliance challenges across multiple cloud security service providers which is why multi-cloud security solutions are needed.
What are the Multi-Cloud Security Challenges
There are multiple challenges associated with multi-cloud strategies. The primary cause of these challenges is the increased complexity of managing security across multiple cloud platforms. Some of them include:
#1. Lack of Visibility and Control
In multi-cloud strategies, a problem arises from the inability to gain complete visibility across the cloud. Most cloud service providers have their own management console and monitoring tools, but they do not provide a complete view of the multi-cloud environments. In turn, this hampers threat detection, and threats could go unnoticed. Security teams face a lot of issues while trying to monitor data movement across different cloud environments without a central management console.
#2. Inconsistent Security Policies
Across multiple clouds, organizations need to define uniform security policies. Considering that each cloud has its APIs, controls, and cloud configurations, there is a general problem associated with the implementation of security measures. This can lead to weak security coverage, exposing some parts of an organization’s infrastructure.
#3. Complex Compliance Management
Requirements for meeting regulatory compliance become more complex in the multi-cloud environment. Various clouds keep data in different geographical locations that have different data protection and privacy regulations. To comply with standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI DSS in the multi-cloud context, the organization needs to track the location of its data, how it is kept, and who can access it in different cloud platforms. Moreover, more effort is put into auditing and reporting since the data and logs need to be collected from multiple sources. It makes maintaining compliance costly and complex.
#4. Increased Attack Surface
Using multiple cloud providers means that there are more entry points for an attack. Also, services provided by different cloud vendors and platforms differ. As a result, the organization using multi-cloud can face a specific set of vulnerabilities and entry points for an attack. Additionally, the connections via APIs open multiple routes for attacks. Thus, the security system needs to be expanded and sophisticated enough to provide timely response and recognition of all threats.
#5. Skills Gap and Resource Constraints
Managing security in the multi-cloud setting requires a variety of skills and knowledge of how to use the security tools that are specific to each cloud vendor. This becomes difficult due to the gap in the skills of the team responsible for multi-cloud security. Another common problem is that the company does not have enough resources to ensure appropriate security measures. It can mean that there are not enough personnel or budget to properly deploy, control, and optimize the security of all cloud platforms used by the organization.
Multi-Cloud Security Best Practices
Multi-cloud security is not easy to implement since it needs to address all the challenges on all the platforms. Organizations should implement the best practices mentioned below for better security in a multi-cloud environment.
1. Implement Centralized Visibility and Management
Having a centralized system for visibility and management in place is an important consideration in a multi-cloud environment. As such, organizations should invest in event management (SIEM) tools that can act as a single pane of glass for the entire multi-cloud infrastructure. These SIEM tools can collect necessary data from all cloud platforms and help security teams monitor security events, detect threats, and deal with any security incidents.
Centralized management ensures that policies are enforced consistently, audits are effectively unified, and incident response time is improved. In addition, centralization also helps to reveal misconfigurations, compliance issues, and potential vulnerabilities that otherwise might have been overlooked in isolated environments.
2. Adopt a Zero-Trust Security Model
Using a zero-trust security model is an important measure to take for multi-cloud environments. The idea here is to trust no one by default and verify the identity of all persons and devices that want to gain access to resources both inside and outside the organization’s network. It is also essential to apply zero-trust principles and grant users only the minimum amount of access required for them to do their jobs.
Organizations should implement multi-factor authentication on all the cloud endpoints and use identity and access management that can work across multiple cloud providers. Last but not least, the organization should frequently review and revise the scope of permissions and promptly remove those that have become unnecessary.
3. Encrypt Data Consistently across all Platforms
Given that data encryption is a fundamental factor in multi-cloud security, it is necessary to make sure that a consistent approach to encryption is implemented across all cloud environments. In other words, organizations should implement encryption of data at rest and in travel. Also, they should adopt strong, industry-grade encryption algorithms.
In addition, it has to be ensured that an appropriate key management policy is implemented, including key rotation. Special care must be taken to ensure that data remains encrypted when it is being transferred. Also, it is important to adopt data loss prevention or DLP tools. These ensure that all sensitive information is being monitored and secure.
4. Automate Security Processes and Compliance Checks
Automation is a decisive factor in making sure that an organization’s multi-cloud is operating securely. Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) tools must be implemented across the cloud. Security controls should be provisioned automatically, compliance should be monitored continuously, and the incident response process should be automated.
IaC templates should be used to ensure that new cloud resources are deployed with the necessary security controls. It is important to routinely scan for security and compliance across the cloud.
5. Develop a Comprehensive Incident Response Plan
Organizations should create a single incident response strategy that would meet the needs of all cloud environments. The strategy can outline the management of risks, constantly update teams, and clarify the current context and responsibilities. Organizations should make sure that their security teams have access to all the tools that are required to find and resolve the threats.
On top of this, it is required that clear communication should be made with every cloud provider that the organization uses to make sure that there is collaboration between all during the time of the incident.
Eliminate Multi-cloud Security Challenges with SentinelOne
SentinelOne offers a solution to address the security challenges of multi-cloud environments. By using advanced AI and automation, SentinelOne provides organizations with a unified platform to protect, detect, and respond to threats across diverse cloud infrastructures. Let’s explore how SentinelOne helps eliminate key multi-cloud security challenges:
Unified Visibility and Control
SentinelOne’s platform offers a single, consolidated view of the entire multi-cloud environment. By integrating seamlessly with major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, SentinelOne eliminates the visibility gaps that often create issues in multi-cloud setups. Its AI-powered platform provides real-time monitoring and threat detection across all cloud assets, containerized environments, and workloads.
Consistent Security Policies
Among major multi-cloud security challenges is a need for the security team to implement different policies across various clouds. The SentinelOne platform provides central policy management for all the cloud providers. Protection controls, access policies, and compliance orders can be added and handled from a single control plane. SentinelOne’s policy engine has the ability to differentiate among the policy options offered by the cloud providers, getting security coherence across all of them.
Advanced Threat Detection and Response
Multi-cloud operating environments are particularly vulnerable to advanced cyber threats because of their complexity. SentinelOne uses AI and machine learning to provide real-time threat detection and response across all cloud platforms. The platform uses behavioral AI to identify any unusual activity and, therefore, any potential threat, whether it is using new or previously unknown attack methods.
Consequently, SentinelOne’s autonomous response capabilities can automatically contain the threat and remediate it without causing any damage. Such a multi-cloud security solution is perfect for organizations that need a reliable threat detection solution.
Simplified Compliance Management
Ensuring compliance across dozens of cloud platforms is no small task. However, SentinelOne makes it easier with the built-in compliance reporting and management capabilities. The platform constantly checks the organization’s multi-cloud operating environment against the chosen compliance policies and creates detailed reports that can be used in audits.
Apart from this, the platform also offers suggestions as to how the problems caused by non-compliance can be remedied. Whether an organization is working with the GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, or any other type of regulatory standard, SentinelOne simplifies compliance management, saving hours on this time-consuming process.
Cloud-Native Security at Scale
The ability of a security solution to scale alongside the multi-cloud operating environment is crucial for modern organizations. Traditional security solutions are often not suited for dozens of cloud platforms. However, SentinelOne’s cloud-native security solution can be confidently scaled with the growth of an organization. Thousands of cloud workloads can be protected without any reduction in performance, avoiding security as a bottleneck for other hosts of issues. The lightweight SentinelOne agents and containerized security modules are perfectly compatible with the latest cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes.
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At this point in time, as organizations keep implementing multi-cloud strategies to gain a higher level of flexibility and a wider range of capabilities, the security of multi-cloud has become an issue of principal importance. At the same time, the number and the nature of security risks associated with the use and management of multi-cloud are quite significant. Thus, such problems as limited visibility, lack of consistency between cloud security policies, increased complexity to ensure compliance, more diverse opportunities for cyber attacks, etc., have to be addressed properly.
To secure multi-cloud, it is important to ensure centralized visibility, conduct security in the aspect of zero trust, ensure consistent data encryption, and, therefore, automate manual processes to ensure higher levels of security and generate a comprehensive incident response plan.
It is necessary to note that SentinelOne makes it possible for organizations to tackle the issues of multi-cloud security, including increased visibility, enhanced security policy, reliable threat recognition, and maximized scalability. At the same time, it is necessary to mention that in the long run of the development and improvement of cloud technologies and their use, more and more threats will emerge while the nature of those available at the modern point of time will change. Schedule a free live demo with SentinelOne and learn how you can stay protected today.
FAQs
There are multiple challenges of multi-cloud architecture. Some of them are complex management of multiple cloud environments and determining if the security policies are uniform across all platforms and if compliance and protocols are followed by all cloud providers.
Security is much more challenging in a multi-cloud environment. The increased complexity and expanded attack surface, as well as the diversity of tools and protocols of different providers, make it difficult to ensure security. Multiple security interfaces should be used, and it may be hard to ensure the necessary visibility and speed of instruments.
There are major security concerns for the cloud. Among them are data security and prevention of its loss, access control, security of networks and data links, and management of compliance. Organizations must ensure that their data is encrypted both at rest and in transit, implement strong authentication and authorization mechanisms, and secure network communications.
SentinelOne is a perfect choice for multi-cloud security because it consolidates application endpoint protection solutions and has a wide range of AI-driven security features. The software is built for compatibility with all cloud environments and can guarantee easy implementation of DoD standards-based cyber security solutions.