Most business solutions are migrating to the cloud due to the flexibility, scalability, and cost-saving features. However, while moving to the cloud, data, systems, and services can be exposed to serious security and compliance challenges.
When moving data to the cloud, it is necessary to ensure that your information and data remain compliant with the laws and regulations of your industry.
With the implementation of federal laws such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act), and PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), organizations face more regulatory pressure than ever before. Compliance can be made more challenging and complicated in a cloud environment.
“The cost benefits for cloud service providers come from the ability to scale multiple clients across shared resources. This can make compliance difficult as regulations often require encryption, auditing, and data separation, which increase hardware requirements and limits resource sharing. These additional requirements may increase the cost of the cloud solution to the point where it is no longer a good business decision,”
-Joseph Granneman--Information security professional for the financial and healthcare industries
Migrating to the cloud can increase the organization’s ability to achieve their business objective, but also increases the complexity for delivering services securely to the clients. Due to the interconnected nature of the cloud environment, a malicious attacker can potentially gain access to a number of systems.
When considering your cloud architecture, it is important to have a very good cloud compliance mechanism in place to reduce the complexity and associated risk. Proper foundation scaffolding is a must to achieve a proper balance of IT policies that are appropriate for both internal line of business "experiments" and agile applications that are intended to transform your business.
Maintaining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data has become the most prominent requirement for the business, and cloud service providers are rushing to harden security. For example, Microsoft recently introduced shielded VMs deployment to protect cloud-based servers from theft attempts and hyperjacking.
Effective data secure in the cloud requires the combined efforts of both the client and the cloud service provider. Key components of your compliance strategy should include:
As more standards have been developed, it has become more challenging for businesses to stay in compliance. Most of these regulatory compliance standards were not specifically developed for cloud computing but they are applied to cloud architectures. These standards include:
Businesses are digitally transforming and expanding to the cloud, and protecting both physical and virtual assets from threats is becoming more challenging and complex. Risks such as phishing attacks, ransomware, natural, and human-made disasters can threaten the viability of any organization. Businesses need monitoring, management, and security solutions that effectively address both on-premises and cloud environments.
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