The recent shift to remote working has forced many organizations to lean on cloud applications and services more than ever. By embracing the cloud, businesses can reduce operational costs, simplify IT operations, and roll out new products/services faster. However, implementing a cloud computing platform without adequate planning and analyzing its security aspects could result in operational complexities like sprawl and cyber risks. Not every cloud provider offers the same level of security and governance controls. Besides, it's crucial to strategize and create a clear business case for effective cloud adoption.
That's why, tech leaders must consider working with skilled cloud consultants. These consultants evaluate and optimize both private and public cloud infrastructure. In addition, their expertise in cloud governance models helps enterprises achieve appropriate levels of cloud security without alienating speed and agility.
Role of Cloud Consulting Services
For enterprises, engaging offshore cloud consulting services providers delivers numerous benefits than internal administration. The dedicated cloud consultants provide advanced cloud intelligence and threat detection capabilities, backed by the support of threat examiners and sophisticated tools, to overcome misconfigurations and mismanagement. These consultants also help business leaders embrace strategic usage of cloud resources and alleviate cloud sprawl/data silos.
Offshore cloud consulting service providers are trusted partners that provide innovative and effective governance while reducing the complexities associated with managing multiple cloud environments. They also give organizations access to cloud platform-specific expert resources with experience navigating varying regulatory environments. Consolidating and managing cloud security operations with a third-party consulting firm helps businesses lower operational expenses.
Overcoming Cloud Sprawl with Different Governance Models
Centralized
In this governance model, cloud consultants form a board of dedicated technical architects and business leaders to administer cloud consumption throughout an organization. The architects generate a reference architecture to determine platform and operating standards, along with a roadmap for deployment, while the leaders create procedures for monitoring business cases and benefits. Together, the council lays standards for privacy, security, disaster recovery, and business continuity that enterprises must fulfill.
Centralized governance maximizes transparency into and control over an enterprise's cloud spending, and thus provides an effective mechanism for minimizing compliance and operational risks. Moreover, creating this governance model provides guardrails for a cloud ecosystem from which leaders can integrate security at a speed that meets business demand.
Federated
By adopting a federated cloud governance model, consultants aim to balance centralization with the autonomy and speed that many tech leaders seek. In the federated model, consultants along with in-house leaders build a structural domain comprising methodologies and tools used to protect cloud infrastructure. This domain enables leaders to pivot their cloud services as required. Federated cloud governance works effectively in large-scale enterprises with diverse lines of business. As per a survey, around 75% of digital leaders mention that federated governance helps in achieving the highest maturity on cloud controls and optimizing workflows.
Distributed
Distributed cloud governance offers individual business teams the authority to select their own cloud services and providers. The consultants guide team members on how to configure the cloud ecosystem and make changes to processes when requirements scale. In-house IT teams can use this model as a guide to distinguish cloud security from private data center security and LAN while functioning within cloud infrastructure.
Additional Steps Followed by Consultants to Alleviate Sprawl and Misconfigurations
1. Educating CSP's Security Model
Before employing a cloud platform, consultants make sure the in-house leaders understand the security model of the cloud provider. This is crucial for two reasons. First, providers deliver varying terminology for similar models. For instance, users might organize assets via tags in Azure but Google cloud requires organizing assets through projects. This influences how cloud security policy alterations are employed, so understanding the terminology helps in averting sprawl.
Second, it's essential from an operational perspective. cloud consultants educate leaders about the available security features, as well as the potential value or limits of those features. With this context in mind, project leaders can identify any necessary modifications to the operational profile to ensure the functionalities are used effectively. Consultants also help leaders in building out a control map for comparing security features between different cloud providers. This is particularly valuable for enterprises looking to adopt a multi-cloud environment.
2. Patching Consistently
Once engaged, cloud consultants are primarily responsible for keeping cloud-based workloads up to date. In most cases, it's the responsibility of consultants to patch the software or applications and close security gaps, and reduce the chances of exploitation.
By leveraging automation tools, offshore cloud-based service providers implement centralized patch management. It is the practice of organizing and deploying patches from a single, unified system, instead of handling each workload separately. This approach is especially important in multi-cloud environments due to their complexity and scale.
Another approach typically involves using microservices, containerization, and continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines. It's a key best practice followed by consultants for patch management in multi-cloud environments due to its scalability and efficiency. For instance, by programming a cloud-native patch management system, the consultants automate scaling and applying patches across hundreds of virtual machines in a cloud ecosystem in minutes.
3. Monitoring and Maintaining Inventory
Keeping an eye on any cloud-based resource constantly is an effective practice. However, like patching, dedicated cloud consultants organize cloud infrastructure monitoring functions. By monitoring memory usage, server load, network stability, and more, cloud consultants help in regulating the enterprise's resource allocation. Through continuous monitoring, consultants eliminate underutilization and over-provisioning of resources, thereby increasing operational efficiency. It's important to remember that business leaders should also set aside enough time to build a separate monitoring strategy.
Additionally, consultants will help leaders keep an up-to-date inventory of resources by using the IaaS console. This console will list what resources are active, but it won't necessarily include information about who in the enterprise is using a resource and for what. It's helpful to maintain cloud resource inventory information using related notes or tags. This inventory enables IT teams to cross-reference data, monitor workloads across providers, and assess workloads at a glance.
4. Enhancing Data Accessibility With Analytics
Cloud sprawl results in fragmentation and silos which prevent team members from retrieving the insights they require. In many situations, storing and managing data in the public cloud also translates to a loss of information control. Moreover, when more data moves to the cloud, applications tend to follow it, a phenomenon termed as data gravity. This substantially impacts application performance.
To realize the maximum potential of data, consultants implement an analytics platform that allows the workforce to remain flexible by making data accessible and allowing them to control where it resides. Keeping data highly obtainable helps in reducing distance-based latency that can occur with traditional analytics. Additionally, by embracing modern analytics, enterprises can limit costs, speed up time to insight, and enhance operational efficiency.
5. Closing Legacy Resources and Fortifying APIs
When assessing the company's overall cloud security posture, the consultants keep an eye on legacy systems and accounts that are no longer in function. Some common examples include idle cloud instances and servers. By deactivating unnecessary legacy systems, the consultants reduce threat possibilities and save operational costs at the same time.
In addition, most software-driven enterprises now use APIs to make their cloud applications and workloads more flexible and accessible to customers and partners. However, enterprises often have poor visibility into their APIs, which makes them vulnerable to data breaches. In such cases, the cloud technology consulting teams strengthen the security posture by increasing visibility into the APIs. This is done by integrating all APIs with SSL/TLS security protocol. SSL/TLS provides integrity on all information exchanged between a server and a client, including important access tokens such as those utilized in OAuth. It resolutely provides client-side authentication using certificates, which is crucial in many cloud environments.
Closing Thoughts
For any cloud project, leaders should maintain better control over security and governance. The sooner leaders deal with cloud sprawl, the easier it will be to limit, contain, and prevent it in the future. A cloud strategy devised and implemented by dedicated consultants helps in the effective management of the cloud environment and keep it running efficiently, even when business shifts and evolves. A dedicated cloud consulting partner can give tech leaders much-needed transparency and an action plan to end the sprawl before it spreads.
