As organisations accelerate their efforts to modernise IT infrastructure, multi-cloud strategies have become increasingly common. Currently, 78% of organisations rely on two or more cloud providers, highlighting a strong shift towards organisations wanting to achieve greater agility, resiliency and optimised performance. This growing trend is fuelled by organisations wanting to avoid vendor lock-in, reap the benefits of best-in-class services from various providers and align workloads with specific business needs and regulatory demands.
Yet, the speed of multi-cloud adoption is often surpassing organisations’ ability to secure these environments effectively. With operations now spanning multiple public and private cloud platforms, maintaining consistent security policies, visibility and governance is becoming more complex. As data and workloads become more distributed, the challenge of protecting them grows, particularly amid evolving cyber threats and increasing regulatory scrutiny.
So, how can organisations sustain the benefits of multi-cloud environments while ensuring robust data security? Let’s take a closer look…
Navigating the security risks
Although multi-cloud architectures deliver benefits like agility and scalability, they also introduce heightened security risks. A recent survey reveals that 61% of cybersecurity professionals consider security and compliance the primary barriers to expanding cloud adoption. At the same time, 64% expressed concerns about their ability to detect real-time threats.
This highlights a broader issue. As organisations diversify their cloud footprint, risk management becomes more fragmented and harder to control. Diverse cloud platforms each have their own configurations, tools and security models. This can result in inconsistent policies, reduced oversight and an increased likelihood of misconfigurations.
These inconsistencies not only compromise the overall security posture but also expand the attack surface, providing more entry points for potential threats. Security teams often lack unified visibility and control across platforms, making it difficult to respond to incidents effectively and quickly.
To reduce exposure and improve resilience, businesses must adopt an integrated, cross-platform security strategy that delivers consistency, compliance and clarity across their entire cloud infrastructure.
The key foundations for a secure multi-cloud environment
Organisations are scaling globally and deepening their reliance on cloud services. As a result, they face increasing pressure to secure data while complying with complex regional and industry-specific regulations. Traditional, fragmented security tools are no longer sufficient. Securing a multi-cloud environment demands a cohesive, integrated approach that spans cloud platforms, providers and policies.
A resilient multi-cloud security strategy is built on several foundational pillars that work to protect data, ensure regulatory compliance and support operational resilience. The pillars include:
1. Encryption and data protection
Protecting sensitive information is vital. Encryption should be applied to data both in transit and at rest, ensuring that even if data is compromised, it remains unreadable. Effective data protection mechanisms help mitigate the risk of branches and enhance data integrity.
2. Compliance oversight
Regulatory compliance varies across jurisdictions, making continuous monitoring essential. This includes maintaining audit trails, automating policy enforcement and staying adaptive to changes in legal frameworks to avoid penalties and maintain customer trust.
3. Interoperability and standardisation
Security consistency across cloud platforms is key to minimising complexity and risk. By standardising security protocols, organisations can reduce the chances of misconfiguration, simplify management and make it easier to scale or switch providers when needed, without compromising protection.
4. Threat detection and incident response
Real-time visibility across the entire cloud environment is crucial for early threat detection. Proactive monitoring, automated alerts and rapid response mechanisms allow organisations to contain incidents before they escalate and reduce potential damage.
5. Access control and identity management
Only authorised individuals should have access to critical systems and data. Enforcing least-privilege access, implementing multi-factor authentication and centralising identity management are vital for preventing both external breaches and insider threats.
Together, these five foundational pillars form the basis of a secure multi-cloud architecture. They not only protects against a broad range of cyber threats but also ensure resilience, compliance and trust in a complex and dynamic digital landscape.
Securing the future of cloud with resilience and control
As cloud ecosystems become increasingly complex and interconnected, ensuring robust security across multi-cloud environments is more critical than ever. It’s not just about protecting against external threats, it’s about maintaining visibility and control over where data resides, how it’s accessed and how it’s governed.
Achieving a secure cloud future requires strategic planning, strong security foundations and a commitment to digital sovereignty. By embedding data protection into every layer of their cloud strategy, organisations can build last trust, ensure compliance and position themselves for long-term resilience and innovation.
- Cybersecurity
- Infrastructure & Cloud