New Approaches to Cloud Security: What You Need to Know About Multi-Cloud Environments

The high-speed movement of the times of businesses towards digitalization and innovation leads a lot of them to use multi-cloud environments to become more agile, scale faster, and — simply to avoid vendor lock-in.

Unfortunately, when doing so, they will have to solve the issue of creating an effective cloud security strategy, that is able to work on multiple clouds. To succeed, they will need to provide an additional level of protection for their data, as well as systems that are distributed between multiple clouds. Let’s have a gist of the most effective ways to make sure you have a secure multi-cloud environment, providing actionable insights and the latest cyber security solutions.

What is a Multi-Cloud Environment?

A multi-cloud strategy is when a business uses more than one cloud computing service in any capacity, following a preferred network topology. In layman’s terms, a business buys cloud services from more than one vendor rather than relying on a single vendor to escape vendor lock-in — to make the IT infrastructure more efficient and to offset the damage cost in the event of a shutdown of any services.

• Custom features: As a business, you will have the freedom to choose the features of your cloud systems. This way, you will know they fit and complement your workflow.
• Vendor Lock-In Mitigation: When organizations diversify their vendor selections, they will not have to depend on only one, single service provider.
• Improved Agility: As a business, you will be able to make good use of very many resources so that you have better adaptability.

That said, you don’t get something for nothing. Managing a multicloud and keeping everything consistent is far from straightforward — which takes plenty of maturity to get right. This doesn’t change for managing sensitive workloads or data, which are intrinsically risky in a multicloud environment.

Challenges in Securing Multi-Cloud Environments

Indeed, as we already mentioned, there’s plenty of new and interesting security challenges that come with deploying a multicloud environment. Getting all of your ducks in a row across all of your clouds so that everything works correctly is tricky enough, and it’s even more difficult when you’re working with sensitive data and workloads.

• Inconsistent Security Policies: Different providers have unique configurations, increasing misalignment risks.
• Data Sprawl: Distributed data is harder to monitor and protect.
• Compliance Challenges: Managing data that spans multiple jurisdictions brings about more GDPR or HIPAA challenges.
• Visibility Gaps: Lack of unified oversight hampers threat detection and timely responses.
• Identity and Access Management (IAM): Implementing secure authentication controls over other platforms can be a challenge.

New Approaches to Cloud Security in Multi-Cloud Environments

So you've been busy with new transformation projects and it was very clear how fast things are moving into the cloud era and how important it becomes to assess and design the right security for your organizations and business data. For that reason, we thought organizations and businesses should embrace the cloud, and understand some of the best operational practices when dealing with the right security.

Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA)

• Continuous Verification: Every access request undergoes authentication.
• Least Privilege Access: Restricts user permissions to essential functions.
• Behavioral Monitoring: Detects anomalies in user activities.

ZTA minimizes lateral movement within systems by eliminating inherent trust assumptions.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

• Misconfiguration Detection: Identifies potential vulnerabilities automatically.
• Automated Remediation: Resolves issues without manual intervention.
• Compliance Tracking: Ensures adherence to standards.

Solutions like Check Point’s CloudGuard simplify navigating the complexity of multi-cloud configurations.

Encryption Everywhere

• Data at Rest: Utilize AES-256 encryption for stored information.
• Data in Transit: Protect transmissions with TLS/SSL protocols.
• Centralized Key Management: Providers like AWS or Google Cloud offer robust solutions.

Encryption is critical for safeguarding data against unauthorized access and breaches.

DevSecOps Integration

• Early Risk Identification: Automated scans detect vulnerabilities during development.
• Secure Containers: Protect containerized applications across platforms.
• Seamless Collaboration: Integrates security into the CI/CD pipeline.

Solutions like GitLab and Jenkins have been leveraged to ensure security as code - inside the development pipeline itself.

Secure API Gateways

• Authentication Enforcement: Verifies identities for every API interaction.
• Traffic Monitoring: Detects unusual patterns or unauthorized access.
• Data Flow Protection: Ensures secure communication between services.

API gateways are so very important for reducing vulnerabilities in interconnected cloud environments.

Threat Intelligence and AI Integration

• Anomaly Detection: AI-driven tools analyze data for irregularities.
• Predictive Analytics: Anticipates potential breaches based on patterns.
• Automated Responses: Mitigates threats in real-time.

Machine learning models significantly enhance threat detection and response capabilities.

Best Practices for Multi-Cloud Security

To effectively manage multi-cloud security, organizations should first of all educate teams. Why? By providing training, security across all cloud platforms will be a definite guarantee as the team will have all the basic (and sometimes complicated) know-how on everything cyber security.

Organizations should also conduct audits. Not once, not twice, but regularly so that they can identify and address any vulnerable situations within the systems. To add on to this, teams should come up with disaster recovery protocols so that in the event a vulnerable situation happened — say if key information is lost — they will be reliable backup systems.

Finally, organizations are advised to put in place a shared responsibility model that will help shed light on the roles providers and the organization itself plays to avoid mixups and blame games (in the event of an unfortunate situation). 

The Future of Multi-Cloud Security

Are companies implementing multicloud platforms? Definitely — yes! But now, there is a huge focus on automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and specifications that offer interoperability. So as a company that wants to forge ahead of the pack, what should you look for?

• AI-Powered Threat Detection: This will offer you real-time monitoring and a response right on the ground in case a threat is detected. 
• Secure Access Service Edge (SASE): This will put all your eggs in one basket — that means combining networking and security in one single platform.
• Quantum-Safe Encryption: You will be well prepared for post-quantum security challenges that might come up at any time.

Hybridization of private and public cloud systems will be an area where we will see advanced maturity too! Offering flexibility in a balanced control between the private cloud for sensitive workloads and growth consumption from the public cloud resources.

Securing the Future of Multi-Cloud Deployments

The components all lend themselves to a comprehensive strategy that can be undertaken with the right methodologies and solutions. Zero Trust Architecture, Cloud Security Posture Management, an advanced security platform to further fortify the posture, ensure all the pieces are covered, and validate nothing for compliance. There’s always more you can do. Leveraging AI, securing API gateways in the solution adds another dimension and helps you be even more protected…even less at risk!

Here’s the truth: No, you can’t do everything. Good partners like Check Point fill in the rest. They bring advanced threat protection capabilities. They aren’t just vendors, they are fighting the good fight with us to secure multi-cloud!