Cloud security is critical to business growth

Cloud technology has evolved from a cost-reduction initiative to a business innovation enabler. Today, ninety-four percent of organizations use not just one, but multiple cloud environments to support their business.¹ Yet enterprises will continue their digital transformation journey, as 80 percent of workloads have still not migrated to the cloud.²

Building security into every phase of your cloud journey

Securing a hybrid multicloud environment requires a different approach than previous security programs that solely considered on-premise environments. A successful journey to hybrid multicloud requires security consideration at every phase of the journey. These phases are not a linear list of what needs to be done, but rather a continuous iterative cycle of strategy, development, implementation and management to:

• Establish a secure cloud strategy and roadmap
• Move and build for the cloud with a coordinated DevSecOps approach
• Continuously manage cloud threats and ensure cloud resiliency

How do we get started and what’s our goal?

A critical initiative for a successful journey to the cloud starts with a cultural change of organizational enablement and empowerment to help business and technical teams come together, establishing alignment to common business goals. Security teams need to be woven into the fabric of the business.

Once the value of collaboration across the business is understood, security teams need to develop and share their hybrid multicloud security strategy with the rest of the organization to demonstrate how it will enable, not impede, business goals. First establishing a baseline of where you are with your on-premise and cloud security, then defining a target state and building a roadmap, taking into account your key business needs and objectives. Before you get started, you’ll also need to define and classify your critical business data and locate where that data resides. Along the way, you’ll need to ensure that the same macro-level strategy is defined and addressed across every layer of the stack. With those pieces in place, you’ll be able to identify the ideal future state for your enterprise security program, who owns which responsibilities, compliance considerations and more.

Where is our critical data and who has access to it?

Cyberattacks often target data, and then use stolen credentials to access it. In order to protect your data, security teams need to locate, classify, secure and manage it, wherever it is, on-premise or in the cloud. Plus, they need to identify users and manage access to data across a hybrid environment in a frictionless manner.

How do I build, deploy and manage secure workloads in the cloud?

Prior to cloud computing, security, technical and operations teams existed in each of their siloed parts of the business. But as technology advanced with mobile, BYOD and SaaS, technical and operations teams came together, and their alignment brought greater strides for the enterprise. Now, with the integration of the cloud, they must also work collaboratively with security teams across the business.

A successful security program starts with embracing a secure-by-design culture. This, in turn, introduces security earlier in the development lifecycle, from enforcing the right set of traditional and cloud-native controls (e.g., network, endpoint, identity and data) to continuous testing and validation. The entire process is then supported under the foundation of automation: establishing a robust and automated DevSecOps toolchain, automated deployment of base security controls and policies.

Maintaining secure workloads in a hybrid multicloud environment means that security teams need to have the capabilities to:

• Automate secure application development
• Define policies by workload requirements
• Automate security controls using infrastructure-as-code
• Manage configurations in a multicloud environment
• Repeatedly test their security defenses

How do I adapt to threats and respond to attacks?

Threat management in a hybrid multicloud environment requires a unique set of capabilities. These include the ability to centralize threat visibility across disparate cloud platforms as well as on-premise environments, adapt policies based on threat current intelligence, quickly detect attacks and orchestrate organization and third-party wide containment, remediation and recovery.

Continuous improvement as cloud continuously evolves

Cloud security is far from static; like the cloud itself, it’s constantly in motion. Security teams need to continuously monitor and optimize their multicloud security processes, from incident response playbooks to compliance reporting. As security requirements change and cloud technology evolves, organizations need to dynamically adapt to this movement, from re-orchestrating processes to re-thinking their security strategy and implementation.

Secure your future with IBM hybrid multicloud security

The cloud is a pathway to business innovation, but one where security teams need to re-align their strategies and re-think their processes to enable a more secure path to cloud-based innovation. This means doing things like building security into DevOps processes, augmenting cloud-native security controls with additional security, attaching policies to cloud-based workloads, orchestrating multiparty responses across multiple cloud platforms and monitoring compliance continuously — all things that IBM Security can help you do better.

With our hybrid multicloud security solutions, your organization can use any cloud with confidence, creating an environment of trust that enables businesses to innovate and grow. IBM Security is helping thousands of organizations of all sizes on their cloud journey, from defining the right security strategy to managing multicloud environments. Only IBM Security can deliver solutions based on extensive research into quantum computing, IoT, AI and the experience of monitoring 70+ billion security events every day.

IBM has a deep understanding of enterprise security in today’s hybrid multicloud world. Let us help you take the right steps toward a secure cloud journey today.