Ensuring security and compliance in evolving cloud environments

With the rapid pace of cloud adoption, organizations are quickly revolutionizing business operations but are having a harder time ensuring that systems are built and operated effectively and deployed with the proper cyber hygiene. Business growth experts say to move fast and break things but failing to implement appropriate cybersecurity controls simply doesn’t work because both the regulatory and threat landscape are evolving more rapidly than ever. 

Even before organizations embarked on huge digital transformation projects, most were behind in meeting regulatory compliance requirements because they relied on manual processes and tools, such as Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. Cloud adoption exacerbated those problems, leaving Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) to manage large portfolios of applications sprawled across multiple environments and networks. Managing compliance in these complex and fluid environments is a near impossible task with traditional tools, and it’s going to get worse in the years ahead.  

Challenges of rapid cloud adoption

The accelerated shift to cloud services introduced a wide range of challenges, from more complexity to non-IT related governance, to increasingly ephemeral environments. These serverless systems scale up and down automatically based on load, making it difficult to maintain consistent asset inventories. Tracking and monitoring resources and gathering evidence to demonstrate compliance can be challenging in these environments unless continuous monitoring is in place. 

In addition, most organizations operate in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, which only adds to the complexity introduced by continuously changing cloud environments. Traditional governance, risk and compliance (GRC) tools haven’t evolved at the same pace, generating outdated and incomplete reports that aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Instead, CISOs must adopt solutions that continuously monitor security, identity, and access management across both public and private environments. 

Cloud native compliance

Many of the regulations in place today were built for infrastructure that was more static, thus simpler to document and harden. Yet the regulations themselves continue to evolve to keep up with cloud adoption, including GDPR and CCPA protections for data privacy in the cloud, data sovereignty, residency, transfer, and cybersecurity frameworks. These new and updated regulations all make it imperative for organizations to be able to manage compliance requirements in the cloud effectively. Continuous controls monitoring (CCM) is an emerging technology-based solution that can automate risk assessments and compliance workflows. This approach is indispensable for ensuring both security and regulatory compliance because it strengthens security protocols and embeds compliance within cloud operations. 

Some of the key benefits of CCM as a cloud-native GRC solution include: 

• Unifies disparate tools, controls, and evidence across environments. By collecting these diverse data sources, CCM tools can analyze and evaluate risk and control data from multiple platforms. 
• Increases accuracy, enabling security analysts to make decisions quickly based on real-time and near real-time data and analysis. 
• Enables the use of compliance as code standards, including the Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL) published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), moving compliance and risk processes towards a modern DevSecOps approach. 

Compliance as code also facilitates machine-to-machine attestation, which provides the technology required for CCM. Together, these tools enable organizations to replace manual processes and add real-time visibility into their compliance and security procedures. 

Artificial intelligence & compliance

Based on the news, it appears that every organization is adding artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities into their solutions. As adoption of AI increases, threat actors will continue to make use of it to carry out more sophisticated attacks. At the same time, more regulations will emerge to govern the use of AI. AI also enables organizations to generate and deploy code faster than ever, increasing the need to radically improve compliance capabilities for cloud and hybrid environments. These changes place an additional compliance burden on internal teams to stop emerging threats, keep up with new regulations, and manage the volume of applications and services deployed in cloud environments. 

AI can help compliance and security teams by handling a lot of the more tedious compliance-related tasks, such as writing policy documents and drafting control implementation statements as well as enabling predictive analytics and gap detection. Still, it remains evident that AI introduces new attack vectors, both directly from malicious actors and from employees inadvertently exposing sensitive data or intellectual property. This balancing act is impossible without compliance tools designed to leverage the capabilities of cloud computing and AI in a secure and controlled manner.

Achieving compliance today & tomorrow in the cloud

Cloud environments are complicated and detecting and identifying risk quickly can be extremely difficult, resulting in significant issues with regulatory compliance. To overcome these challenges, organizations must adopt tools that enable compliance as code, using OSCAL to express control-based information easily, and continuous controls monitoring to enable automated monitoring and assessment of system controls. Cloud-native tools offer the best option for organizations seeking to improve GRC initiatives and prepare for the changes ahead. CCM strengthens security protocols and embeds compliance within cloud and development operations, streamlining the protection of digital assets in a quickly evolving landscape.