Managing Data Security And Privacy In Multicloud Environments

Innovation Managing Data Security And Privacy In Multicloud Environments Rehan Jalil Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Jun 30, 2022, 06:00am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Rehan Jalil is CEO of cybersecurity and data protection infrastructure firm SECURITI and ex-head of Symantec’s cloud security division.

getty Enterprises’ love affair with multicloud is getting stronger by the day. Indeed, IDC forecasts that more than 90% of enterprises worldwide are likely to be using more than one cloud provider by 2022. The core drivers for using a mix of public and private clouds include the desire to access best-of-breed products, streamline compliance with regulations and market requirements and avoid vendor lock-in.

While multicloud offers numerous business advantages, it also presents unique security and privacy challenges, including these six: 1. Keeping track of data assets: Keeping tabs on data assets across multiple clouds is complicated by the fact that these assets are siloed. Not only do organizations have to use a unique management console for each cloud service provider (CSP), they often have multiple accounts with each CSP.

Muddying the waters even more, organizations can possess hundreds of SaaS data assets. 2. Fragmented discovery tools: Most data discovery solutions can struggle in a multicloud environment for several reasons.

Native cloud discovery tools are limited to discovery within one cloud environment, requiring complex coordination to address multiple cloud environments. Traditional third-party discovery solutions, on the other hand, are not always optimized for multicloud environments and may require administrators to define dozens, even hundreds, of policies for data attributes and user permissions. MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event 3.

Dark data: As organizations migrate to multicloud environments, it is challenging to track all of the data systems not native to the cloud (i. e. , migrated from platforms) that may become active.

Lift-and-shift migration and the use of open-source software by development teams may lead to dark data systems that go undetected by native tools. These systems introduce potential risk, as they may contain sensitive data that is unaccounted for. 3.

Lack of support for large data volumes: Traditional data discovery solutions were not designed to operate in hyperscale cloud environments and often lack the scalability, efficacy and performance needed. To squeeze functionality out of their tools, administrators often adopt cumbersome and labor-intensive workarounds. These include installing, managing and maintaining hundreds of servers to scan large data volumes—a process that can take weeks or months to complete.

4. Manual compliance management: Given the phenomenal growth in cloud-based data assets and the sensitive data stored in them, enterprise privacy officers are hard-pressed to achieve compliance by doing things manually. Techniques such as surveys, assessments and questionnaires are not just time-consuming and prone to error, the results yield only point-in-time insights into sensitive data.

5. Weak data risk posture: The ability to identify the risk impact of misconfigurations—such as public access and unencrypted data—stored in data assets is not something at which cloud security posture management (CSPMs) systems or native CSP tools excel. In general, they lack perspective into the risk levels of sensitive data.

Such weaknesses limit the ability to prioritize remediation and may result in false positives as some cloud assets may in fact be properly configured for public access. 6. Unintended access: CSPs have rich and flexible tools for administering roles and permissions.

However, the complexity of these identity management solutions combined with the massive number of data stores, makes it challenging to really know who has access to sensitive data. This is exasperated by the distributed nature of administration management and the tendency for privileges to proliferate. As a result, users may wind up with many unintended routes to sensitive content.

This becomes a challenge as organizations strive to maintain a least-privilege access model around all of their cloud data stores. Though these challenges are difficult, they are not insurmountable. Consider the following best practices in order to build a secure multicloud environment: • Create a central data asset catalog that ties into CMDBs, CSPs and other custom asset inventory systems using APIs; unify data silos into a single pane of glass; and replace manual approaches for privacy compliance with PrivacyOps.

• Coordinate adoption of multicloud with key stakeholders in the organization, including data security, data privacy and data governance, to ensure all of their requirements are addressed. • Continually monitor the risk posture of data assets across all cloud environments to prioritize remediation of configuration issues, access issues and regulatory exposures. Multicloud environments provide numerous business benefits, yet they also introduce new security and privacy management challenges that are difficult to address using traditional techniques.

By removing roadblocks and unifying and automating monitoring and compliance workflows, organizations can overcome these challenges and remain secure and compliant. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify? Follow me on LinkedIn .

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