Most mid-sized to large enterprises have already moved some of their infrastructure, data, and workloads into the cloud for better agility, efficiency, and cost savings. Nearly three-quarters of businesses are running a hybrid and/or multi-cloud strategy today, according to Forrester Research.
Cloud migrations are often part of larger digital transformations that include DevOps, microservices, APIs, and containers. Security is never the driver — though it may be the most important passenger. To make cloud transformations as efficient and successful as possible, companies must remain secure and compliant throughout. There are three keys every enterprise IT and security leader should know.
1. Standardize security practices across your entire hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure
Every company’s transformation is different and performed at a different pace. Companies on average are using almost five different public and private clouds today, and that diversity creates governance and security challenges. You still need to ensure consistent compliance and security practices everywhere. When you have a choice, a comprehensive solution with a broad enough footprint can deliver a single pane of glass that enables complete visibility across your enterprise.
2. Use a modern security platform for the cloud automation era
Today’s cloud-enabled enterprises strive to be agile, collaborative, highly automated, and efficient. Manually moving workloads to the cloud is slow, labor-intensive, and error-prone — leading to more security vulnerabilities and wasted time and money.
Consider CI/CD: developers strive to deliver features quickly, but manually combing through code for vulnerabilities slows the process to a crawl. What’s needed is a solution that automatically spots vulnerabilities or prevents exploits by default. Your security solution shouldn’t just support the cloud — it should actively enable efficient cloud workloads and migrations with rich automation, DevOps, and DevSecOps capabilities, while protecting your critical APIs.
3. Use defense-in-depth for applications, APIs, and data — wherever they reside
If not executed securely, migrating to the cloud can cause your threat surface to balloon. To stay ahead of threats, you need a multi-layered security architecture that provides autonomic defense-in-depth.
Start with application security — web application and API firewalls as your first line of defense, complemented by DDoS protection, bot management, and account takeover protection. Security shouldn’t just guard the perimeter; for best protection it should reside adjacent to or within cloud applications and data, including born-in-the-cloud databases (DBaaS) such as Amazon RDS, Azure SQL, and Google Cloud SQL.
Buying your risk down
When implementing defense-in-depth, businesses are best guided by a thorough threat assessment that takes a risk-buydown approach. Create a comprehensive inventory of threats, then calculate the potential financial losses if each vulnerability is exploited. This outcome-led methodology enables security teams to weight risk properly and invest rationally — putting dollars into the security layers that offer the greatest ROI in reducing financial risk.
What Mekas offers
As an authorized partner of Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, and a partner of cybersecurity leader Imperva, Mekas Cloud Services champions the fight to secure data and applications wherever they reside. We offer a full managed security services portfolio — building a secure cloud security foundation, designing Identity and Access Management, organization-level policies, protecting your data from exfiltration, and protecting your web applications in the cloud.