The COVID-19 pandemic brought undeniable disruptions for organizations and their employees whether business, personal or otherwise. Across the globe, businesses and governments alike were forced to try and manage these disruptions. For nearly all organizations, digitization initiatives were accelerated in a short period of time, from implementing work-from-home policies and launching new applications to support a distributed workforce to adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to adapt supply chain processes and more.
According to Gartner, by 2022, 30% of all security teams will have increased the number of employees working remotely on a permanent basis and by 2023, 40% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in cloud infrastructure and platform services. The distributed cloud enables organizations to provide products and services when they’re needed in this era of work-from-anywhere, whether to their employees or customers.
Even in sectors such as energy and utilities, which are historically heavily reliant on standard on-premises installations and had often avoided cloud adoption, business leaders are realizing the value of migration, especially in light of the global pandemic. These businesses are able to deliver digital products with speed, experiment with tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) to increase productivity and to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) across assets, among other benefits. Still, cloud migration risks abound, and new challenges may arise. A risk that cannot be ignored is the cybersecurity risk. Meeting regulatory IT compliance and managing risks involved with cloud computing are top challenges facing those migrating their workloads to the cloud.
Cloud Migrations and Security: Clear Risk and Compliance Gaps
Many cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud and others have a global network of service models that include compliance teams and consulting organizations that help with risk and compliance for their cloud instances, whether public, private or hybrid cloud. Many of them have even built tools for customers to use to implement basic risk and compliance management in-house, leveraging relevant data and applications. However, monitoring and meeting security and compliance controls that span people, processes and technology for cloud environments, and in the broader context of the enterprise, is complex. This is one cause of cloud migration risk, and is a challenge for many other reasons; lack of measurement, visibility and accuracy are three of the greatest risks when migrating to the cloud. The point solutions that currently support most cloud instances don’t elevate the posture of cloud environments to that of the enterprise risk posture, and the majority of assessments still remain point-in-time and qualitative. Metrics are fractured and far from holistic, and very few, if any, solutions can provide insight beyond compliance and into real-time risk management.
IT and security regulations and standards are filled with requirements that were created before the cloud became a commodity. In the energy sector, for example, cloud security isn’t taken into account because regulators and industry leaders couldn’t fathom those platforms becoming as pervasive as they have, because on-premises installations were standard to the industry. On-premises installations are still a mainstay in energy, power and utilities, and for those who have become more comfortable with cloud migration processes, there is a clear and pressing need to leverage their human capital, processes and technologies to implement robust risk management practices.
Beyond regulatory compliance lags, many distributed organizations opt to have multiple providers in place, requiring a multi-cloud approach to compliance requirements and risk assessment. As more organizations consider cloud migration risks and begin shaping their cloud migration strategies, there are some innovations that address risk management and compliance in the cloud, but not many. Measuring, managing and reporting on compliance frameworks, making the shared responsibility model actionable, and getting a view into risk are all serious challenges. Cloud providers will continue to mature and bring new innovations to their services, but, to date, there hasn’t been a lot of anticipatory work done in this area. The focus has largely been on creating reactive solutions. In heavily regulated countries, the challenges only become greater.
Leverage AI Automation for Compliance and Risk Management
There is a shift occurring in cybersecurity and IT risk management, calling for the dramatic disruption of the legacy IT governance, risk and compliance (GRC) space and demanding a reevaluation of how we manage compliance and risk in the digital age. For years, data has been aggregated manually and analyses performed on out-of-date information. With the increasing availability of automation, the five functions of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework – identify, protect, detect, respond and recover – are becoming more continuous in nature and shifting into real-time management, from assessment to reporting and more.
Leveraging this technology in the cloud is no exception, but those who look to reinvent their approach must look for solutions that go beyond the siloed capabilities of cloud security posture management solutions and similar markets.
Ultimately, the true test of this next-generation approach comes when organizations are able to roll all of this data up to risk. With risk metrics that are supported by drill-downs, trend reports and risk profiles, executives can get the visibility they need into their posture with the most up-to-date data, informing their key business decisions. Using this next-generation approach to risk will inform global expansion, allow executives to evaluate risk across lines of business, and increase cyber maturity in any cloud-based organization.
