Multicloud Security and Identity with Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS)

To understand multicloud security, it’s important to know what multicloud and hybrid cloud services are. Multicloud refers to the use of cloud services from multiple cloud service providers. With multicloud, your business can oversee separate projects in different cloud environments from several cloud service providers.

Like multicloud, a hybrid cloud uses multiple cloud environments. However, in a hybrid cloud setup, work is distributed in a shared workload system across a public cloud, on-premises resources, and a private cloud.

One benefit of both hybrid cloud and multicloud is their adaptability and cost effectiveness. Both allow for more flexibility when managing assets and data migrations between on-premises resources and the cloud. Additionally, businesses have the benefit of more control and security with a private cloud in a hybrid cloud environment.

“Multicloud security” is a solution that helps protect your business assets - such as private customer data and applications - against cyberattacks across your cloud environments.

Many organizations are finding themselves with a de facto multicloud strategy, even if that wasn't their deliberate strategic intention.

In a multicloud environment, it's critical to ensure consistent security and identity experiences to avoid increased friction for developers, business initiatives and increased organizational risk from cyberattacks taking advantage of security gaps.

Driving security and identity consistency across clouds should include:

•Multicloud identity integration

•Strong authentication and explicit trust validation

•Cloud Platform Security (multicloud)•Microsoft Defender for Cloud

•Privilege Identity Management (Azure)•Consistent end-to-end identity management.

Cloud environments have some unique challenges. With multicloud, the lack of visibility across cloud environments can make it challenging for your organization to monitor the health of its cloud infrastructures.

Therefore, when helping secure your cloud environments, consider the following:

•The security posture of your cloud resources. It’s important to choose the most secure locations for your data, whether that be on premises or in the cloud. In addition, developing a business continuity and disaster recovery plan and using data loss prevention tools are essential to helping secure cloud.

•How to best protect cloud and hybrid workloads against threats. To ensure that your business has the best visibility of what’s happening in your cloud environments, use cloud security solutions that offer investigation, reporting, and threat detection, as well as those that help prevent cloud security threats.

•Authentication. Develop a strategy that allows your business to centralize policies for authentication and authorization. That way, no sole cloud service provider has completely different authentication and authorization protocols.

•Updates. Ensure that software updates are automated for individual cloud service providers to help avoid weak spots

•Native security support. Security platforms should reduce adoption resistance, not ask you to perform lengthy preparations for protection.

•Centralized visibility. Avoid a setup that requires you to jump back and forth between platforms to get a full picture of what’s going on in your multicloud - this will save time and reduce frustration.

In today’s complex world of cyberthreats, many types of multicloud security threats exist.

Here are a few common situations and obstacles to consider when forming a multicloud security plan:

•Lack of unified management and governance

•Silos, staffing constraints, and training gaps

•Protecting workloads regardless of where they’re housed

•Lack of interoperability

•Misconfigurations or configuration drifts

•Lack of visibility across environments

•Maintaining consistent access controls

•Shadow ITDeveloping and operating secure apps

Fortunately, organizations can prevent many multicloud security threats from ever surfacing by forming a security plan and adhering to some best practices:

•Know your enemy. By learning the most common ways that cybercriminals attempt to gain access to your cloud.

•Automate processes whenever possible.

•Combine security incident and event management with extended detection and response to automate workload protection.

•Prioritize consistency. This treats your multicloud as a cohesive ecosystem rather than one with many different rules and settings to remember and follow - which increases the risk of human error.

•Use single-point-of-control management. In this management style, your cloud engineers have the benefit of a sole control panel from which they can more easily oversee the security settings for your multicloud.

Identify and remediate security risks by using the Microsoft Defender for Cloud Secure Score and Inventory

•Defender for Cloud evaluates cross-cloud resources for security threats.

•Secure Score aggregates findings to indicate the overall security status.

•Enhance security by following Defender's recommendations and using the Inventory page's filter for specific vulnerabilities.