The easy availability of cloud solutions means that enterprises, no matter their size, can participate in an increasingly cloud-based, digital economy. The ease with which an enterprise can spin up new applications and features, scale up and down in users, and respond quickly to customer demands allows enterprises to outpace their competitors. While the business advantages are measurable, there are cloud challenges among the triumphs.

The benefits are widespread and extensive, but cloud solutions also introduce new risks and problems that organizations often fail to anticipate. For instance, cloud solutions are so easy to access that it’s convenient for a department to implement a solution without going through the traditional process of IT procurement.

Shadow IT and Other Cloud Challenges

As a result, the IT team may have little or no idea of many of the applications on their network, making it challenging to address any vulnerabilities related to cyber security. Also, each of these cloud solutions is heterogeneous, with different providers and different security tools and levels of security. This creates cloud challenges relating to establishing and enforcing security policies.

Enterprises accessing cloud solutions may also not realize to what extent they are still responsible for securing their cloud environment. While the provider will secure the infrastructure, such as the storage facility shared in a public cloud setting, the data, content, and applications are still under the security umbrella of the enterprise. These controls need to be built separately for each cloud environment that the enterprise is adopting.

If the enterprise IT team has not built fully integrated security solutions across cloud environments, the steps necessary to secure data and systems can pile up, becoming overwhelming and leaving the organization vulnerable to a cyber attack.

Cloud Challenges with a Multi-Cloud Solution

While enterprises will choose between public, private, hybrid, and community cloud, the general outcome is often some form of a multi-cloud solution. It complicates security and management, but it often makes sense from a cost perspective to have a mix of public and private cloud, and there are often legacy systems that the enterprise wants or needs to keep in place.

The challenge with a multi-cloud solution is that it broadens the security plane of the environment and makes it more complicated for IT to manage and deploy security in a way that offers consistency and visibility. It also increases other cyber security risks, including insecure interfaces and application programming interfaces (APIs), data breaches, and system vulnerabilities.

Enterprises need to be able to implement security policies that work across a multi-cloud environment, as well as introduce automation so that these policies can be applied simultaneously.

If you would like to know more about how to effectively address cloud challenges with appropriate security policies and tools across a multi-cloud environment, contact us at eXemplify.