Today, many businesses are using cloud computing services to streamline their processes and make their businesses more flexible.
However, there are challenges with this shift, especially with maintaining governance and compliance. Security and regulatory compliance become critical with data spread across multiple platforms and roles shared between the organization and cloud computing providers.
So, read on to learn the nine best practices to help you deal with the complexity of cloud governance and compliance.
An Overview of Cloud Compliance
Cloud computing introduces a shared responsibility paradigm in which the organization and the cloud provider share security and compliance.
Even if cloud providers have strong security measures in place, businesses still need to put extra controls in place to safeguard their systems and data.
Several industry-specific laws regulate data management and security, including SOX, PCI DSS, GDPR, and HIPAA.
General data protection laws and cybersecurity frameworks, such as ISO 27001(ISO/IEC 27001 is an international standard to manage information security) and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, also offer helpful direction.
Best Practices for Cloud Compliance and Governance
1. Define Clear Objectives and Policies
Effective cloud governance starts with well-defined policies and procedures that are in line with organizational goals and legal requirements.
To ensure consistency and compliance across the entire organization:
- Clearly define roles and responsibilities
- Access controls
- Data classification policies
- Acceptable cloud usage guidelines
2. Conduct Audits for Compliance
Once compliance standards have been established, you should conduct audits to make sure the regulations are being adhered to.
Of course, you can accomplish this manually by assessing how your cloud workload configurations adhere to the guidelines you’ve set.
However, employing auditing tools to automatically search cloud configuration files, logs, and other data sources to find compliance violations based on the rules you have set up is a far more efficient way to automate compliance.
3. Determine Compliance Requirements
Find out exactly what the criteria are for compliance with your cloud workloads. The majority of compliance frameworks use general language when describing compliance standards.
For instance, the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) requires “reasonable security” to protect sensitive data, but it says nothing about the specific tools or setups that businesses need to use to achieve sufficient security.
This implies that the organization must evaluate compliance needs and decide how to convert them into appropriate tools and procedures.
4. Create a Baseline for Security
Organizations can improve cloud security in several ways, including by
- Using strong encryption,
- Multi-factor authentication and
- Regular vulnerability fixes.
Determining the nature of your typical cloud operations will support establishing a security baseline. A cloud governance platform can provide a first evaluation of your account’s performance.
Ideally, you should address any dangers or vulnerabilities that could be exploited by threat players, or at the very least, you should be aware of them.
To lessen the impact of accidents, it’s critical to be ready for them. In addition to having the tools and backups you need to recover from an incident, you should have a plan in place for how you will handle incidents.
5. Prepare for a Changing Regulatory Landscape
Laws are always changing, particularly regarding the security and privacy of data. Make sure your cloud governance frameworks can rapidly and effectively adjust to these developments by being flexible and agile enough.
Structures such as the Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) and NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) offer helpful direction for creating flexible security postures.
6. Improving Accountability and Transparency
Cloud-managed services are made more transparent and accountable through the use of compliance and governance procedures.
Cloud-managed service providers assist businesses in gaining insight into their cloud operations through frequent:
- Reporting,
- Audits, and
- The upkeep of clear documentation.
By being transparent, you can build confidence with customers, regulators, and other stakeholders by showcasing their dedication to security, compliance, and moral business conduct.
7. Prioritize Reliability
Cloud services differ in their features related to data redundancy, automatic scalability, and failure detection.
Some managed cloud services extend data replication across regions for global workload processing capability, while others provide autonomous capacity scaling and within-region data redundancy.
So, ensuring that the parameters of your Service Level Agreement (SLA) meet the resilience requirements of your workload is essential.
It is essential to use the resiliency characteristics that have been previously discovered for workloads that run on separate compute and storage resources to guarantee reliability that meets the requirements of the workload.
8. Boost Your Financial Efficiency
The foundation of good cloud governance is the early establishment of strong cost management tools and controls. Although cloud computing and storage are typically less expensive than on-premises infrastructure, the pay-as-you-go approach necessitates careful resource management.
Bill shock is frequently caused by common expenses, such as:
- Testing and development environments that are ongoing.
- Older data backups and replications. Unlimited storage of dated information, even pointless snapshots.
- Excess of available resources. Excessive resource provisioning without adequate supervision.
- Bandwidth or exit fees. High cloud expenses can be the result of excessive egress charges, which can quickly mount up.
9. Incident Response Plan
After a security breach, mitigating damage and resuming operations depend heavily on an organized incident response plan. Roles, duties, and detailed processes for managing different sorts of incidents are outlined in this plan.
Important elements consist of:
- Clearly defined procedures for identifying and reporting possible occurrences are necessary for incident identification and reporting.
- Containment: Isolating the compromised system or network to stop further harm.
- Eradication: The process of getting rid of the threat and getting systems back up and running normally.
- Recovery: Putting procedures in place to stop a recurrence and restore data and services.
- Post-event analysis: Examining the event to determine lessons learned and enhance reaction times.
For instance, if a ransomware attack is discovered, the strategy can include
- removing the compromised systems from the network right away,
- alerting important parties,
- contacting cybersecurity professionals and
- initiating data recovery.
To Be Concluded
In an environment that prioritizes the cloud, achieving compliance and governance is a continuous process that calls for constant attention and adjustment.
You can reduce risks, safeguard sensitive data, and gain the trust of stakeholders and customers by adhering to these nine best practices and taking a proactive attitude.
Keep in mind that maintaining cloud compliance is essential to your entire business strategy and not just a checkbox exercise.