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Organizations undertaking the move to the cloud face a blizzard of sometimes confusing buzzwords. Theres hybrid cloud, multicloud, digital transformation, microservices and so much more. While these terms can be confusing, the key element to keep in mind is that cloud data security should be an inherent part of business-level strategy and discussion for any successful cloud migration.

The importance of addressing key security and compliance needs weighs heavily on many organizations. Its a very valid concern, as an estimated 990 million cloud servers are misconfigured.

In addition to cloud misconfigurations, some of the most top-of-mind hybrid cloud and multicloud concerns include:

Having so many issues to consider at once can be difficult to address effectively. To save time and become more productive, you should begin with these five basic concepts that will improve the outcomes of your cloud security program.

At the heart of every successful cloud security program is a well-defined strategy that includes the following criteria:

You may at some point consider whether native security controls from your cloud service provider (CSP) are viable or adequate enough to manage security for your environment. CSPs have varying sets of security controls baked into their cloud platforms. They can provide many advantages, including a limit on the number of third-party licenses youre managing, flexible consumption, ease of integration and more.

However, a cloud-native security approach raises some questions that need to be answered:

Once youve decided on the native security controls that are right for you, effectively managing those controls and policies requires first ensuring you have the right architecture and policies in place to support your business and regulatory requirements. And you should also have a strong governance layer that allows you to turn your cloud-native telemetry and alerts into actionable, prioritized decision-making.

Having the right configuration and continuous compliance of your cloud environments is vital for your cloud cybersecurity program, but this can be complex to oversee. You may have multiple teams or lines of business using your cloud services while having to comply with global standards from organizations such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS). Complicating your situation is an inability to get cloud context and correlation fast enough to help in detecting and responding to cloud security issues.

You should consider using cloud security posture management to address these complications and achieve the following goals:

Your application container environment may face security complexity and visibility challenges, limited testing time during rapid scaling and delivery, increased traffic and threats of container compromise. The following phases of container environments are major risks that can act as threat vectors:

Fortunately, coverage exists to secure container workloads for a hybrid cloud and multicloud environment. Following a thorough assessment and strategy, you need to consider integration services, design and implementation as well as on-going management for all phases of your container lifecycle. When those capabilities are in place, you have the following security benefits for Red Hat OpenShift, Kubernetes, Docker and other container platforms:

Development teams focus primarily on producing new applications and functionality for consumers as quickly as possible. Operations teams work on ensuring a responsive and stable system. To meet the increasing demand in the cloud for rapid innovation, development and operations should be integrated to foster collaboration and balance between development and quality.

Security strives to make sure that those rapid application deployments are free of vulnerabilities and comply with regulatory and corporate requirements.

To most meet the critical objectives of these teams, you should consider a culture shift to DevSecOps methodologies. DevSecOps is the consolidated set of practices that represents a combination of culture, process and technology for its practitioners.

By adding DevSecOps and secure development practices into your workloads, you can benefit from:

IBM Security Services is ready to help you learn more about and incorporate these cloud security solutions into your enterprise as you make the journey to the cloud. Register for a webinar on how to Accelerate your digital transformation with modern cloud security on April 1, 2021.

The right approaches can help you reimagine and modernize your approach to hybrid cloud and multicloud security.

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