Maintaining compliance in the cloud is fundamental to consumer confidence and ensuring organizations meet data regulations, thus avoiding fines and legal action. A recent cloud security report found that 85% of organizations see continuous compliance as a priority when migrating workloads.
So what are the biggest 2019 cloud compliance challenges?
1. Multi-Cloud Muddle
Previously everything was safe in your on-premise data center. But as soon as you start putting your data into the cloud you must have an understanding of where it’s being stored. This means you can ensure your data remains compliant with the regulatory requirements involving global data residency.
With multi-cloud storage becoming the norm, and employees accessing data from multiple devices, it’s increasingly difficult to keep visibility of where your data is being stored and accessed from.
2. Shared Responsibility
Many organizations mistakenly think that once data is sent to the cloud, all security and compliance responsibility is down to the cloud provider. This is just not true.
Some public cloud services and SaaS products do offer a variety of additional security and compliance features on top of the security of the infrastructure and platform providers. Regardless of this, in this shared-responsibility framework, ultimately the responsibility for the security of your data lies with you.
3. Poor Data management
Where there are huge amounts of data often there is no clear data owner and poor control over the lifecycle of the data. This is when the management of this data becomes a real challenge.
Many organizations see security as an IT issue, but the secure and compliant management of data now encompasses the whole business. This is especially true with SaaS and any Shadow IT that your organization may have (even without your knowledge). With the amount of the data and the levels of risks involved, it is vital there is clearly defined responsibility for the data, and the lifecycle of this data must be properly managed. Organizations must be able to audit how data is acquired, processed, analyzed and secured.
4. Advanced Cyber-Threats
As more companies move to the cloud, the potential for cyber-threats grows. Every year cyber-criminals are becoming more sophisticated with attacks aimed at getting your organization’s valuable information.
There are already vulnerabilities and back-doors in on-premises environments, and the use of cloud services, especially hybrid or multi-cloud environments, brings another level of complexity with new challenges and risks.
Cybercriminals are using a mix of methods to compromise systems and infrastructure. This, coupled with an increasingly mobile workforce, has made it easier to attack organizations when their endpoints are attached to insecure networks. Although most aspects of cybercrime can be covered as cloud security, when a third party gains access to your company’s data, it very quickly becomes a compliance issue.
5. Shortage of Compliance/Security Staff
The Life and Times of Cybersecurity Professionals 2018 highlights that “nearly three-quarters (74%) of respondents say that the cybersecurity skills shortage has impacted their organizations significantly or somewhat.” Due to this shortage, hiring compliance staff to monitor and administer your cloud environment can be very costly if you can even find the staff to fill the roles.
Contact us or call us on 0845 625 9025 to find out how we can help you with Cloud Compliance Engine, Cloud Security, Endpoint Protection, Secure Web Gateway, Breach Detection, DNS Security, DDoS Mitigation and many other solutions to help you protect your data.