The cloud offers undeniable benefits, including reduced costs and greater flexibility, scalability and efficiency. However, the cloud also makes regulatory compliance more difficult.
Choosing a compliant cloud provider is an important first step. Many organizations stop there, assuming that’s the extent of their responsibilities. However, customers are ultimately responsible for protecting their systems, applications and data in the cloud. They must have the right security controls and processes to ensure compliance with applicable regulations.
One of the cloud’s main benefits — on-demand provisioning — creates one of the most significant compliance challenges. Anyone with a corporate credit card can provision cloud services, often with just a few clicks. That person can then move data into the cloud with little to no understanding of regulatory requirements. Countless organizations have been hit with regulatory penalties because sensitive data was exposed in shadow IT environments.
A related challenge is lack of visibility. Few organizations have a complete picture of what data is stored where. Data may wind up in places that are not compliant with applicable regulations.
Elements of Cloud Compliance
Cloud compliance begins with a clear governance strategy. Cloud governance establishes the organization’s policies and procedures for provisioning, using, accessing and retiring cloud resources. Cloud governance helps organizations control costs, reduce sprawl and ensure consistency across cloud resources. It also gives users a framework for achieving and maintaining compliance.
To develop a governance strategy, organizations need to understand what laws, regulations and standards apply. While most regulations will be applicable across the enterprise, some will be specific to a particular cloud environment. This is determined by the residency of cloud data.
Data residency refers to the physical location where data is processed and stored. That, in turn, determines data sovereignty — the national, regional or local rules that apply to the data. Each jurisdiction can have wildly different legal and regulatory requirements. Organizations need to understand data sovereignty to make effective decisions and data residency.
Benefits of Continuous Compliance
Clearly, this is not a one-time determination. The cloud environment constantly changes to meet business demands. However, many organizations treat compliance as a once-a-year, manual box-checking exercise. This method is prone to error and leaves them scrambling to meet requirements if gaps are identified. Organizations that lack full visibility into the cloud environment will likely overlook problem areas. Worse, they are at greater risk of a cyberattack that compromises data and leads to potential fines and penalties.
That’s why more organizations are becoming proactive with continuous compliance strategies. They use automated tools to monitor the cloud environment and manage against regulatory requirements. Gartner predicts that 60 percent of organizations will adopt continuous compliance by 2025.
Real-time monitoring tools continuously assess cloud configurations and notify administrators of noncompliance. Automation reduces the burden on IT teams by tracking configuration changes, maintaining audit trails and generating compliance reports. The compliance management process is simplified, and the risk of noncompliance is dramatically reduced.
The Need to Stay Vigilant
Of course, this assumes that organizations are aware of all the cloud resources in use. Shadow IT won’t go away, so IT teams should implement tools to detect it. Cloud access security brokers typically have shadow IT discovery features, along with access controls, data loss prevention and more. Organizations should also implement security awareness training programs that cover shadow IT risks. Department leaders should encourage discussion about what tools are needed and establish processes for identifying compliant options.
Finally, organizations should stay abreast of evolving regulations, including new regulations that may apply due to operational changes. Cloud service providers should be assessed regularly to ensure they meet current compliance standards.
Technologent’s cloud and security experts are here to help you develop an effective regulatory compliance strategy. Let us help you implement the tools and processes needed to ensure continuous compliance and reduce risk.
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