Achieving, maintaining and proving compliance in the cloud can be daunting. There are more servers and instances than before, and many of them are ephemeral, lasting as briefly as a few hours. There are typically dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of workloads and applications dispersed among a range of different cloud services, across multiple clouds from both public and private infrastructure providers.
In addition, data privacy and other regulatory requirements are becoming more stringent and diverse, depending upon where you do business and in what industry. As organizations of all sizes conduct more business globally, they must account for compliance requirements that can differ dynamically across different geographies and industries.
As your organization migrates more workloads and applications to the cloud, compliance has to be considered and accounted for at all stages of the journey.
Compliance is not a destination
In the cloud, compliance is not a destination; it is a continuous activity that has to be actively managed and monitored so that it can be not only achieved, but also maintained, proved and audited.
The cloud creates challenges related to visibility, monitoring, policy management and other areas because of its distributed nature and lack of centralized control. However, organizations can take control of compliance in the cloud by using a single all-in-one security platform with tools built to manage the nature of cloud environments.
With the right solution, you can use a secure platform model to eliminate multiple dashboards and mitigate risk, letting your organization move quickly and cost effectively across the broadest range of regulatory requirements, including GDPR, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, HIPAA and HITECH, and more.
Accelerating compliance
To accelerate compliance in the cloud, choose a service-based platform that includes centralized management control to provide an overall, holistic view across all cloud and mixed environments, whether public, hybrid or private cloud.
Because security and compliance are intertwined, you need to continuously monitor security and compliance controls to make sure system integrity is being monitored and the platform is taking steps to detect and block attacks in real time—including sending alerts to proactively prevent threats and using advanced threat intelligence to secure against known and unknown threats.
In a cloud environment, security and compliance protections must be spread across physical and virtual systems; containerized applications; serverless applications; cloud file storage; multiple operating systems, both current and legacy; on-premises data centers; and, of course, multiple public cloud service providers.
To achieve your compliance goals, look for specific features and functions in a cloud security platform, including:
- Intrusion detection and prevention for each server across physical, virtual, container or cloud environments, examining all incoming and outgoing traffic for protocol deviations, policy violations or content that signals an attack.
- Virtual patching to provide an extra layer of security to help protect against vulnerabilities before you apply the official vendor patch. This helps mitigate exploits that target these vulnerabilities, giving you flexibility to patch regularly without breaking your operational processes for every emergency patch.
- Integrity monitoring for critical operating system and application files (directories, registry keys and values) to detect and report unexpected changes in real time.
- Malware prevention that leverages file reputation, behavioral analysis, machine learning, variant protection and even special ransomware encryption protection techniques to protect your systems.
- Ability to monitor, demonstrate and prove compliance across the broadest range of industry, geography and cybersecurity regulations and standards, including GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, NIST, CIS and SANS.
- Advanced threat intelligence integrated as part of the platform to provide active enterprise-grade protection to gain centralized visibility and control and accelerate compliance.
Cloud Migration: Achieve More Together with Four Security Considerations
A hybrid or multi-cloud strategy is becoming the new standard. However, while a lot of good can come from adopting cloud computing, there are risks. Read this paper for the top four security considerations to prepare your company for cloud migration.
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It is always important to remember―even in a public cloud environment with the shared responsibility model―if your organization fails to meet compliance requirements, it will do you no good to point your finger at the public cloud provider. You are responsible for compliance, and if there are gaps, your organization will pay the fines and suffer any other consequences.
With a centralized platform model, your organization can achieve greater control over compliance and use specific cloud-built tools to monitor and manage compliance with greater speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and confidence.
Please visit Trend Micro to find out how you can take control of your most critical cloud compliance challenges.
