Managing Risk and Compliance in a Multi-cloud Landscape

By CIOReview | Tuesday, April 24, 2018

With fluctuations in the regulatory space, managing compliance becomes a challenge for IT organizations. Due to the cloud adoption, the complexity level in maintaining compliance has increased creating a tougher time for IT organizations. Today, the IT professionals struggle to manage risk and align with governance practices across an ever-expanding diverse multi-cloud landscape. Businesses are grappling with issues like complex security practices, managing risk and governance, and understanding compliance.

Every cloud service provider has its own security and compliance framework that might change often. Therefore, they adapt to their own security framework as requirements change. Before heading towards a multi-cloud journey, IT organizations must take several steps to bridge the prevailing gaps and ensure compliance.

It’s important for IT firms to develop an end-to-end security and compliance framework that includes regulatory standards, network security, data management, among other requirements. In addition to addressing the growing security requirements, the framework should go beyond both the cloud and on-premises environments. Also, they must evaluate cloud service providers based on that security framework.

Organizations should integrate a security and compliance framework into their service delivery model and make it a key feature in the service catalogue. In that way, IT companies can map individual cloud service providers in the multi-cloud mix as per the compliance requirements based on their security needs. In addition, third-party businesses can be involved in steering risk management and developing compliance and governance strategies.

Rather than a messed up post-deployment, security and compliance should be one of the initial steps in planning a multi-cloud journey in order to bridge the gaps and effectively alleviate risk.