Enterprises have increased multi-cloud adoption in the last few years.
Over 62% of enterprises already use a multi-cloud environment, and 64% plan to increase their adoption in the next two years.
With a multi-cloud environment, enterprises can:
- Avoid vendor lock-in by enjoying the best services from different cloud service providers.
- Worry less about losing critical data during disasters as the workloads are distributed across different cloud environments
- Ensure scalability and reliability of mission-critical applications at all times.
However, despite the benefits and growing popularity, enterprises struggle to manage the multi-cloud environment efficiently.
Challenges Of Multi-Cloud Management
- Data breaches
Since each cloud platform has its own set of security protocols and compliance standards, maintaining data security and compliance is challenging. According to IBM’s study on data breaches, 40% of them occur when data is distributed in multiple cloud environments. The problem is exacerbated further when no well-established workflows or controls exist. Inconsistencies, varying security controls, and unauthorized access further expose the data to vulnerabilities.
Read: Improve your cloud security with policy-as-a-code
- Complex infrastructure
With each cloud provider having its own tools and APIs, integrating and managing all of them becomes challenging. To add to the woes, as technology evolves, the concerns of resource allocation, interoperability, potential security risks, and interoperability and compatibility can slow down multi-cloud adoption.
- Compliance issues
While a multi-cloud environment enables enterprises to comply with location-specific regulations, the same thing can pose a challenge if enterprises fail to adhere to compliance standards. Without a proper understanding of data movement and how one service integrates with another, enterprises could face challenges in monitoring compliance.
- High operational costs
Although a multi-cloud environment allows enterprises to negotiate and choose from cost-effective services and tools, a lack of proper management could escalate the costs. Other factors like hidden and egress fees that mount while shifting data between cloud and diverse pricing models and agreements can also increase costs. The only way to address this problem is by accounting for all the clouds and agreeing to fair pricing with multiple service providers.
Read: Controlled cloud costs = faster ROI
- Lack of data governance
Data governance can become complicated as enterprises manage their workload and operations across diverse cloud infrastructures. This is especially evident when the number of cloud service providers and data grows. Without a comprehensive data governance framework, the enterprise could face challenges in designing policies on data collection, storage, access control, and security protocols. They would never know where the data resides within a multi-cloud environment and fall prey to regulatory violations.
Read: The Tight Connection Between Data Governance and Observability
How Data Governance and Compliance Can Solve These Challenges
Enterprises must establish the best data governance practices to address these challenges, balance security and compliance, and harness the benefits of a multi-cloud environment. It will help set up clear policies, controls, and procedures to access data and maintain compliance across all cloud environments without exposing the data to vulnerabilities.
Let’s look at how enterprises can implement it.
How To Implement Data Governance and Compliance
Here’s how enterprises can make the most of a multi-cloud environment by establishing data governance and compliance.
- Form a team of subject matter experts
The first step is to form a team comprising data owners, managers, and subject matter experts. This team will formulate data policies for a multi-cloud setup, review them, and ensure org-wide adoption. It will ensure strict adherence to data governance and compliance policies.
- Assess all the data assets
Next, enterprises must evaluate all the existing data assets within multiple cloud environments to understand the data landscape. They must profile and classify the data to apply appropriate governance policies. They must also eliminate redundant and duplicate data sets from different cloud systems to maintain compliance and optimize cost and performance. This will provide more visibility on data assets across all touchpoints.
- Develop standardized practices
Since every cloud service provider follows its own protocols, enterprises must develop standardized policies and procedures that can be applied consistently across cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Using standardized practices, enterprises can automate cloud compliance and governance, ensure that all future cloud deployments comply with regulatory requirements, and reduce the risk of data breaches and compliance issues. More importantly, it helps enterprises manage multi-cloud environments more efficiently.
- Document the operations and policies
Enterprises must document their operations and policies, cloud architecture, and processes to ensure complete visibility of operations and data across multi-cloud environments. This will help enterprises build a robust resource hub to help teams troubleshoot problems, train new employees in multi-cloud environments, and ensure operational efficiency. It will help them implement future growth plans to take the enterprise to the next level.
- Develop security protocols
To maintain security across multiple cloud environments, enterprises must implement consistent security protocols across all platforms. These include:
- Advanced security solutions with built-in capabilities such as continuous monitoring, threat detection, and automated response features that enable enterprises to take pre-emptive action against data breaches and vulnerabilities.
- Regular inspections and penetration testing to improve the enterprise’s security posture.
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems and Infrastructure as code (IaC) that automate security at each lifecycle stage and provide more visibility on data assets across multiple cloud environments.
- Encryption, data masking, permanent data deletion, and other strategies to protect exposed data from vulnerabilities.
- Audit the multi-cloud strategy continuously
To maintain a secure multi-cloud environment, enterprises must audit it regularly. They must check the controls’ effectiveness and proactively address threats to ensure the overall security of the data assets across different cloud environments. Additionally, enterprises must implement observability practices and a centralized interface for managing cloud platforms. This will help the stakeholders keep track of crucial data and make informed decisions to keep the data secure and ensure a smooth customer experience.
- Implement disaster recovery and business continuity plans
It's crucial that enterprises develop and strictly enforce disaster recovery and business continuity plans across multi-cloud infrastructure. This will help them improve the resilience of a multi-cloud environment, prepare for unforeseen disruptions that could interrupt service delivery, and safeguard the enterprise’s reputation by restoring data and operations immediately. To develop such policies, enterprises must document the data backup procedure, steps to restore systems, and processes to maintain business continuity despite disruptions.
Conclusion
In the modern business landscape, where business continuity is essential, data governance and compliance have become more of a necessity than a good-to-follow practice. This is especially useful when the data is stored across various cloud platforms. It protects the enterprise data from vulnerabilities, helps maintain compliance, and enables enterprises to leverage the full benefits of a multi-cloud environment.
Contact us if you want to ensure success with your multi-cloud strategy.
