If your company relies on cloud-based infrastructure, it may be time to rethink your approach to multi-cloud security.
The current trends paint a clear picture:
- Gartner predicts that over 85% of businesses will adopt a cloud-first approach by the end of this year.
- Of those, more than 50% will rely on a multi-cloud strategy.
- Flexera’s 2024 State of the Cloud Report found that 89% of organizations already used multiple cloud service providers.
It’s not hard to see what makes multi-cloud strategies compelling — but adopting them without proper security is a recipe for disaster.
Key Takeaways
In this article, you’ll learn:
- Why Multi-Cloud Security Matters: While multi-cloud infrastructure is incredibly versatile and flexible, distributing data and applications across multiple services represents a security risk.
- Overcoming Multi-Cloud Security Challenges: Complexity, visibility, consistency, and talent shortages are all roadblocks to effective multi-cloud security.
- Best Practices for Securing Multi-Cloud Infrastructure: Businesses can ensure best-in-breed cloud security by carefully selecting vendors.
- The Benefits of Multi-Cloud Security: Organizations that adopt a multi-cloud strategy typically experience reduced vendor lock-in, more effective detection, response, and prioritization, cost optimization, and improved resilience.
- Common Cloud Security Mistakes: Many of the most significant errors when securing multi-cloud architecture involve configuration and interoperability.
- Tamnoon’s Approach to Multi-Cloud Security: Tamnoon’s solutions include centralized management, continuous monitoring and visibility, and automation.
Why Multi-Cloud Security Matters
The more moving parts in a system, the more likely it is to fail. This simple fact has been true since long before the cloud existed, and it applies to cloud infrastructure just as much as anything else.
All the moving parts in a multi-cloud ecosystem aren’t just potential points of failure, either. Each cloud platform is a potential entry point for threat actors and comes with its own risks and vulnerabilities.
Without proper security, you’re ultimately left with a sprawling digital ecosystem that offers threat actors multiple potential windows of attack.
Another problem is that traditional security tools aren’t designed for multi-cloud environments. They struggle to manage or even scale to complex cloud infrastructure. If a business fails to use a tool designed for multi-cloud deployments, it will have to contend with limited visibility, observability, and integration.
In other words, there’s a good chance they won’t know what an attacker is doing until it’s too late.
Understanding and Overcoming Multi-Cloud Security Challenges
Before we discuss benefits and best practices, let’s take a moment to review some of the specific security challenges you’ll need to overcome.
Security Complexity
This is the largest bugbear in multi-cloud security by far.
Each provider in a multi-cloud environment has its own security controls, architecture, applications, and management tools. A security solution that integrates well with one provider isn’t guaranteed to play nice with all of them. The same applies to monitoring solutions, meaning visibility and observability are also problematic.
Ensuring consistent policy enforcement is similarly daunting, as your team may have to juggle multiple configurations, dashboards, and standards. And the more consoles you have them managing, the greater the chance they’ll eventually make a mistake.
Lastly, each cloud provider will typically follow a different shared responsibility model. For example, one vendor might require you to manage your own encryption keys while another handles that task on your behalf.
A Massive Attack Surface
Each provider in a multi-cloud environment can exponentially increase your business’s attack surface. To make matters worse, an attacker who compromises one component of a multi-cloud environment can easily move laterally to others. Let’s say, for example, a threat actor manages to exploit a misconfigured Amazon EC2 instance.
They could then use that instance as a staging ground to access other AWS components or clouds.
Interoperability
Just as vendors aren’t guaranteed to cooperate with security tools, they also don’t always integrate well with one another. Getting multiple services to work together seamlessly can be a nightmare operationally and from a security standpoint. Managing multiple vendors, bills, and contracts can put considerable strain on your employees.
The Benefits of Multi-Cloud Security
Adopting a secure multi-cloud approach goes hand-in-hand with several benefits, including, but not limited to:
- Better flexibility and adaptability through cloud-agnostic architecture.
- Less risk of vendor lock-in.
- Greater operational resilience due to multiple disaster recovery and business continuity options.
- Increased uptime.
- Cost optimization.
- Access to more diverse resources.
- The ability to use best-in-breed solutions for each application, such as using one cloud provider for container security and another for runtime scanning.
Best Practices for Multi-Cloud Security
A multi-cloud environment is great for business operations, but it’s less great from a security standpoint. To secure a multi-cloud setup without making your team consider a career change, you must adhere to a few strategies and best practices.
Prioritize Centralized Visibility and Continuous Monitoring
You can’t stop what you can’t see, and cybercriminals work best in the dark. Make sure your multi-cloud security architecture includes some form of continuous monitoring functionality along with automated reporting, alerting, and triage.
Don’t just look for suspicious behavior or threat indicators. Also, look for misconfigured systems and misapplied policies. A Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solution can help you achieve this.
All of your monitoring and logging solutions should feed into a centralized dashboard that provides your team with a complete overview of what’s happening in your ecosystem.
Embrace Least Privilege and Zero Trust
Traditional network security is built on trusted access. Multi-cloud security cannot operate on the same principles. Instead, you need to authenticate and continuously validate the identity and validity of every user or device that accesses your ecosystem, working on the assumption that everyone is a potential threat actor, a principle known as zero trust access (ZTA).
Additionally, every user should only be given as much authority and access as they absolutely require to do their job. That means your accounting team shouldn’t have access to your development pipeline, nor should your web developers be able to see the backend for your payroll system. In other words, you must segment and enforce permissions based on each person’s role.
Standardize Your Policies
Take a moment to think about the threats and vulnerabilities your business is most likely to face. Define a set of security standards and controls that address those problems, ensuring they align with industry best practices and (if relevant) regulatory requirements. Now comes the hard part.
You’ll need a way to consistently enforce and apply these standards across your entire cloud ecosystem. While you can technically do this manually, automation is the better option, as it’ll help avoid misconfiguration or misapplication. Speaking of which, that brings us to our next point.
Automate Where Possible
There’s a lot of manual work in cybersecurity:
- Identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities
- Examining logs for suspicious activity
- Investigating potential threats
- Creating reports
- Communicating with other teams for remediation
The good news is that most of this can be automated. Instead of having your security team constantly chasing down stakeholders and threats, you can deploy a sort of multi-cloud digital immune system that automatically flags — and even remediates — security issues with minimal human intervention. The end result is a security team that works faster and smarter, with professionals free to focus on high-priority threats rather than busy work.
Conduct Regular Audits
Even if your security looks ironclad, there’s always something you could be doing better, and there’s always the chance of a mistake or misconfiguration slipping by beneath the radar. That’s why auditing is so important. It allows you to identify:
- Inconsistent policies
- Outdated software
- Improper permissions
- Unpatched vulnerabilities
- Gaps or weaknesses in your security
- Potential compliance issues
Focus on Identity Management
Because cloud ecosystems are so sprawling and decentralized, it’s usually better to focus your security efforts on managing users and devices rather than systems. An identity and access management solution allows you to enforce policies such as role-based access control and multi-factor authentication while easily adopting and applying zero trust and least privilege. It can also help you more readily identify orphaned or compromised accounts.
Choose Your Vendors With Care
Lastly, before you sign on with any cloud security vendor, perform a thorough assessment to ensure they understand and can fulfill your needs. Ensure you also understand what they offer and how they align with their security goals. It’s also advisable to run comprehensive proof of concept trials with each vendor and assess them based on reviews and testimonials.
Ideally, you’ll also want to seek a vendor with expertise in your industry, especially if you’re looking for a managed cloud security solution.
Common Multi-Cloud Security Mistakes to Avoid
As long as you follow the best practices outlined above, you should be able to avoid most cloud security stumbling blocks. With that said, there are still a few pitfalls of which you’ll want to be aware.
Automating Too Much (Or Not Enough)
Automation isn’t a silver bullet for all your security needs and challenges. You still need human professionals to be involved at some point. After all, there are some things even the most sophisticated security tools can’t do on their own.
At the same time, you should still automate while you can. We’ve already mentioned reporting, remediation, and threat intelligence. Provisioning and configuration represent another area where automation can make life considerably easier for your team.
Whatever you choose, you’ll need to find the right blend of automation and human expertise to ensure your cloud security has the agility and know-how to stay on top of alerts, vulnerabilities, and other obstacles.
Siloed Communication
Communication siloes can utterly destroy productivity, efficiency, and morale. And where cybersecurity is concerned, they also represent a huge risk. If your departments and teams are working entirely in isolation from one another, that means there are gaps in your visibility.
And if there are gaps in your visibility, that means there are places where a threat actor can sneak into your ecosystem unnoticed.
Outdated Systems
We’ve all been guilty of postponing a software update at one time or another. Maybe the update came out while we were in the middle of a project, or maybe we keep forgetting to install it overnight and then don’t have time during the day. You cannot afford to make this mistake with your cloud ecosystem.
Remember that unpatched vulnerabilities account for roughly 60% of breaches.
Exposed Credentials
Off the top of your head, how many data breaches can you call to mind where it was later discovered that the business involved was storing passwords or other sensitive data in plaintext?
If you can even think of one, that’s too many.
Access keys, passwords, and other data related to authentication need to be securely stored. Otherwise, you’re doing the digital equivalent of leaving your house key on your doorstep. Just as a locked door doesn’t mean much to a home invader with a key, improperly stored credentials make it easy for threat actors to compromise your people, systems, and data.
Lack of Encryption
Picture a fortress filled with precious resources. It’s nearly impenetrable, capable of withstanding multiple days of sieges. But it occasionally sends out caravans with supplies to other outposts and towns.
If someone wanted to get their hands on those supplies, which would be easier: Attacking the fortress or raiding one of those caravans?
Now, replace the fortress with your ecosystem and the resources with your data. Encrypting sensitive information at rest is not enough. If you don’t encrypt it in transit, criminals will wait for a transfer before they hijack it.
No Backups
Resiliency and redundancy are two of the cloud’s greatest strengths. Make sure you leverage them to their fullest. That means having an automated backup strategy in place with multiple copies of critical systems and data. It also means regularly testing and monitoring your backups to ensure they aren’t malfunctioning (or, worse, compromised).
As with other data, these systems should be fully encrypted.
How Tamnoon Can Help Avoid Multi-Cloud Security Risks
Achieving effective multi-cloud security demands that your business choose the right vendors and tools. That’s why Tamnoon has built our security solutions to address the unique challenges of multi-cloud environments through:
- Integration with existing cloud security platforms, allowing centralized aggregation of alerts and a unified, infrastructure-wide view of your cloud ecosystem.
- AI-powered alert prioritization to avoid notification fatigue and ensure your team can focus on the most critical risks and vulnerabilities.
- Actionable remediation plans are developed through powerful AI analysis and extensive human expertise.
- Automated execution of tasks such as vulnerability remediation and reporting.
- Tailored continuous monitoring backed by custom prevention playbooks.
- Metadata analysis and active investigation to provide enriched security alerts.
- Facilitating collaboration between engineering and security teams.
Ready to get your critical cloud exposure to 0? Book a demo today, and we’ll show you how we can get you there in 90 days.
Frequently-Asked Questions
What are the Key Components of Effective Multi-Cloud Security Solutions?
An effective multi-cloud security solution should include a cloud workload protection platform, cloud security posture management, infrastructure-as-code scanning, runtime scanning, cloud infrastructure entitlement management, and integration with other security tools, such as identity management, security information, and event management.
What’s the Difference Between Multi-Cloud Security and Hybrid Cloud Security?
Public cloud security operates on a different scope and scale than hybrid cloud security, as teams must contend with multiple cloud environments working independently. It focuses more on securing data and applications across diverse cloud instances through standardized policies and controls.
On the other hand, hybrid cloud security tends to be more concerned with integrating legacy and cloud systems and securing data as it moves between private and public clouds.
What Role Does Artificial Intelligence Play in Multi-Cloud Security?
AI and machine learning are increasingly important not just for multi-cloud security but for the cybersecurity industry as a whole. Advanced AI models can analyze and orchestrate enormous volumes of data, identifying anomalies and threats that human personnel would be unable to detect in time. AI also enables the deployment of security tools capable of dynamically adapting and responding to threats.
