This guest blog was contributed by Chris DeRamus, VP of Technology, Rapid7 Cloud.
With the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine inspiring hope in C-Suites across industries, the Fortune 1000 is building out their portfolios again, and in 2021 we can anticipate seeing a rise in mergers and acquisitions in big tech such as Salesforce’s recent acquisition of Slack. As companies inherit enterprises that have already migrated to the cloud, there will be a natural increase in top organizations embracing multi-cloud strategies.
With remote work strategies remaining in place for at least the first half of the year, companies will choose to operate using a multi-cloud strategy rather than forcing acquired companies to move workflows to different providers. When conducting multiple acquisitions, especially in a remote work setting, we are seeing companies inherit other cloud service providers and embracing multi-cloud rather than pushing teams to learn how to work with specific cloud service providers (CSPs).
This is often for three reasons:
It takes significant time and effort to teach a team to embrace another CSP;
There are ancillary features that a particular CSP may offer that may make more sense for a specific arm of a business; and
There is always the element of cost and keeping existing CSPs may make the most sense financially
What does this mean for cloud security? When taking advantage of the benefits of multiple CSPs, organizations need to acknowledge that securing multi-cloud architecture is more complex than security for a single cloud provider. To confidently move forward with security as the cloud footprint evolves, companies will have to tap additional resources and potentially even bring in new services to ensure security is fully covered as each new provider is deployed.
Companies that successfully adopt multi-cloud environments must consider:
Strong Policies: Multiple clouds come with multiple exposure points. Policies become more important since they are a primary catalyst for ensuring security procedures for each cloud and application
Visibility and Integration: In a complex multi-cloud environment, where security threats move fast, operations cannot be siloed. Integration and visibility across the networks, platforms and applications will be critical
Multi-Cloud Security Tools: Organizations may consider tools designed to address multi-cloud specifically
With leading companies demonstrating success thus far, multi-cloud adoption will trickle down and grow in popularity in 2021 and beyond. Those that secure their multi-cloud environments successfully will have incorporated these additional measures and best practices. By 2022, there is no question that multi-cloud will be prevalent as companies continue to see the value in utilizing a mix of different cloud service providers.
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