Did you jump onto the cloud bandwagon too quickly?
The global cloud computing market increased by 635% between 2010 and 2020 - a massive boom attributed to the growing number of SaaS, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers. Businesses worldwide couldn’t wait to embrace the cloud and all the shiny new things it promised.
However, as these things go, we didn’t know then what we know now. Worryingly for today’s CEOs, cloud compliance and security controls were in their infancy back then, and few businesses had the maturity or experience (or patience) to appreciate or anticipate the risks and compliance issues that would emerge. In short, the rush to adopt the cloud outpaced the efforts to secure it properly.
Many deployed their (or their customers') cloud environment using Click-Ops (clickable options). This was an error-prone and time-consuming process that required whoever was setting up the new cloud infrastructure to click through a menu of computing options offered by a cloud provider (think of ordering your new custom-made Tesla, one part at a time, by clicking through hundreds, if not thousands, of options). The potential for costly Click-Ops mistakes was considerable in a long and complex set-up process.
You’ll be glad to know that modern cloud migration has much more governance, control, predictability, and security baked into it as a best practice using DevOps. This approach uses codification - aka ‘everything as code’ or ‘infrastructure as code’ - to define, manage, and maintain requisite standards and governance rules in an ever-changing environment. So, for example, controls can be put in place to assure you and your Board that your data is always categorised and secured correctly and appropriately based on its sensitivity. Mitigating risk and ensuring compliance and security become hard-baked into your cloud environment.
The other good news is that the controls you need can be retrofitted to your existing cloud deployment.
And all too frequently, this is precisely what we are asked to help our customers do. We start with a full 1-10 structured assessment of their environment’s maturity and identify areas of risk. From this point, we can prepare a plan to help them achieve their compliance goal (not everyone wants or needs to be a 10).
Whether your existing cloud environment needs a compliance check-up, or you want to start off your new cloud on the right foot with the most robust controls in place from the outset, we’re happy to help.
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