The US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) introduced mandatory reporting requirements for developers of cloud computing service providers. Complex regulations may draw away innovative projects and talent with the evolution of AI. California’s contentious AI safety bill is getting closer to becoming a law and once approved, AI models will be regulated strictly and undergo rigorous third-party audits to verify their safety. Cloud compliance is not like how it was before, it’s changing. It impacts every organization and with new regulatory laws coming in, we can expect transformative shifts in its landscape. Cloud compliance management encompasses data privacy, protection, and reporting, and addresses other key areas of cyber security. Many organizations face uncertainty about their compliance obligations and don’t even have a cloud compliance management strategy in place.
Today, let’s talk about what cloud compliance management is, its importance, and why you should care about it.
What is Cloud Compliance Management?
Businesses store huge volumes of customer data on the cloud. Credit card numbers, financial information, intellectual property rights, social security data – there’s a huge wealth of sensitive data out there. Customers and stakeholders trust companies to protect their data. And companies must do their best to safeguard their information.
If data falls into the wrong hands, it leads to devastating consequences. The future repercussions are huge and there’s no recovering from them, in some cases. Failure to comply with international laws and regulations can cause organizations to face lawsuits and be under legal attacks. Cloud compliance management is responsible for preventing data breaches and ensuring that sensitive data stays protected. Its main priority is to prevent the erosion of consumer trust and assure organizational integrity.
The Need for Cloud Compliance Management
A cloud cloud compliance management strategy and cloud security posture management are both essential components for an organization. Cloud compliance management helps with storing, processing, and managing data in the cloud. Companies face a variety of cloud security risks associated with their cloud workloads and configurations.
Cloud security is a shared responsibility and both the cloud service provider (CSP) and the customer are responsible for it. Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are the two most popular cloud service providers to exist. A CSP does its best to protect the organization’s cloud infrastructure by implementing continuous monitoring, strong access controls, regular data backups, and disaster recovery planning. But the customer must also do their share in following the best cyber hygiene practices, not interacting with adversaries, and know what kind of sensitive data to avoid uploading or sharing.
A cloud compliance management strategy will also list a set of practices to be followed by both customers and CSPs in that regard. If your company fails to adhere to the guidelines laid down by cloud regulatory frameworks, you could risk losing customer trust, fail at incident response, or even risk a serious data breach. Cloud environments are increasing in complexity which is why it’s essential to have the right cloud compliance strategy in place to work with the best-in-class tools and technologies. Agentless cloud compliance management solutions are evolving these days. You can get them to take care of all critical issues and concerns by centralizing your cloud security posture management.
How to Implement a Cloud Compliance Strategy
A cloud compliance strategy will defend your infrastructure from a variety of cloud-based threats. Although it has the same objectives as traditional cyber security, it varies in the sense that managers should protect their assets inside the infrastructure of the third-party service provider.
Cloud compliance strategy is vital for enabling companies to adhere to industry-standard cyber security regulations.
1. Define Your Organization’s Goals
Make a blueprint of your company’s goals and how you expect to achieve them. A strategy cannot be built without concept or ideation. Your cloud compliance strategy will describe how to map out policies, and regulations, apply frameworks, and assign roles to members. Create a thoroughly researched document, address cloud technology concerns and complexities about its usage, and work with your vendor.
2. Conduct a Comprehensive Risk Analysis
The best way to protect your company and combat threats is to start a comprehensive risk analysis. It should clearly understand how your current cloud security frameworks work and analyze what your cloud security posture looks like. If there are any hidden or unknown vulnerabilities or any security gaps, it will identify them internally. A good risk analysis or cloud audit will also tell you which compliance frameworks best suit your organization.
As the cloud compliance strategy landscape is changing, organizations need to navigate various requirements like CIS, NIST, MITRE ATT&CK®, and ISO. Adhering to regulations such as the ones outlined in GDPR, FedRAMP, and HIPAA can build and maintain customer trust.
Many companies don’t know about their cloud compliance obligations and performing a risk analysis is a good way of finding them out.
3. Use Cloud Compliance Management Tools
You can use a variety of in-house cloud compliance management tools like AWS Artefact, Azure Blueprints, AWS Manager, Google Assured Workloads, and Azure Policy. You can ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your cloud data by implementing the latest data classification schemes. Design and enforce custom data governance policies that align with your organization’s business requirements.
Encrypt data in transit and at rest and use robust access key management practices. There are many third-party cloud compliance management tools you can also use to help with all these aspects.
4. Make a Governance and Responsibility Model with SLAs
Start with determining the responsibility model for your compliance process. With this model, all the securities ambiguities are reduced to zero and it holds everyone accountable from your Compliance team up to the cloud service providers. It holds true whether in the case of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS) that clear demarcation of roles and responsibilities has an important role in maintaining compliance risk levels. It should also define who is responsible for what and who pays what (e.g. compliance tasks, compliance obligations, compliance failures).
The next best thing you can do with your Governance model is make it part of SLA (service level agreement); so that if it is breached by the cloud vendor, you have very good grounds to terminate the contract.
Cloud Compliance Management Benefits
Cloud compliance management assures customers that their data is being protected in the right ways. It helps prevent reputational losses by safeguarding the integrity, authenticity, and confidentiality of sensitive information.
Cloud compliance management can help businesses stand apart from their competitors in the market by proving that they’re trustworthy. It can diminish the risk of data breaches, draw in new clients, and boost customer acquisition. Businesses can be at peace knowing that they have the appropriate measures set up to prevent illicit data access.
It helps make your documentation thorough, shareable, and easy to understand for security teams. All your documents remain referenceable too and cloud compliance management makes them easier to track. A good strategy will make it convenient to onboard cloud service vendors and plan for contingencies in the event of non-compliance. Cloud compliance management will detail all the steps that need to be taken to resolve policy violations as well.
Common Cloud Compliance Risks and How to Mitigate?
Since cloud data volumes are constantly growing, the controls you use to manage them will fail when environments become too oversized or complex. There is a possibility of going through operational downtimes or delays if you don’t evaluate them periodically. The impact of these changes is often missed by organizations.
Here is a list of the top cloud compliance risks and how to mitigate them:
- Insider threats – It doesn’t matter how strong a cloud compliance management strategy is. In the event of an insider threat, even the best security measure or policy will fail. Account hijacking is a huge compliance threat for organizations. Insiders are also capable of stealing account credentials and selling them to third parties on the dark web. Their motives may be financially driven or because they might bear a grudge against the enterprise. Some employees may attack the organization years after leaving the organization, having collected enough data and evidence, and launch these threats when companies least expect them. Common account hijacking techniques used by them are buffer overflow attacks, phishing, key logging, brute force entries, XSS campaigns, and social engineering attacks.
How to mitigate: Use continuous cloud compliance monitoring and security solutions to track user behaviors in the background. Any deviations in normal network or data usage patterns can reveal the telltale signs of information reconnaissance. You can prevent your insiders from studying others in your enterprise and eliminate the chances of planting malicious bugs this way.
2. Data breaches and losses – This is one of the top cloud compliance security risks and challenges. Data leaks are inevitably common through manipulation, alteration, deletion, and other malpractices. The state of the original data may be changed and organizations suffer as a result. Loss of data access is another problem where users get locked out of systems and services, with threat adversaries demanding a ransom to grant them back access to it (and they may not keep their word also).
How to mitigate: Secure your cloud APIs and use an AI-driven cloud security solution like SentinelOne to monitor your entire infrastructure. Create strong passwords and keep changing them regularly, rotate your encryption keys. Make frequent backups to prevent data losses or theft. You can also limit access to your data and revoke access privileges in a timely manner to ensure further security. Plan a comprehensive cloud security breach response plan and conduct routine penetration testing too.
3. System and Service Vulnerabilities – Sometimes the integration of third-party software tools can introduce cloud system and service vulnerabilities. Watch out for these, especially if these solutions are not configured by default. Your cloud security vendor may neglect security by design when providing you with their products and services. Read their SLAs carefully and assess what’s not covered.
How to mitigate: Seek a consultation with your vendors and threat experts and find out what you can do about these security gaps. Alternatively, you can switch to another vendor if you find that your current vendor is not giving you the right balance of service and security.
Cloud Compliance Management Best Practices
Here is a list of the best cloud compliance management practices:
#1. Perform Regular Audits
Conducting regular audits should become a daily part of your cloud compliance management routine. You can utilize cloud misconfiguration detection tools and use pre-built-in configuration checks for great results. Prepare audit reports as well when you finish identifying potential vulnerabilities and forward them to your security team and stakeholders.
#2. Cloud Compliance Automation
You can use ongoing automation tools and processes to streamline the cloud compliance management process. Good automation will reduce your manual workloads, gather evidence for audits, and provide support for multiple standards like ISO 27001 and PCI-DSS.
#3. Education and Training
The cloud security compliance landscape is constantly evolving so it’s important to educate your employees about it. Provide them with training on how phishing attacks work and how to stay protected. Threat actors use creative tactics to lure and fool them into leaking sensitive data, so it’s important to make them aware of their social engineering techniques.
#4. Data Management and Security
Guard your sensitive data in the cloud and monitor your multi-cloud environments. Ensure there is consistency in the application of your selected security policies. Adopt world-class encryption standards, multi-factor authentication, and API-level security. It’s important to note that your CSP might not have the best data backup security measures. You may need to configure your settings to meet your compliance obligations. This is why managing your own keys is the best approach instead of relying solely on your vendor’s encryption features.
How can SentinelOne help?
SentinelOne can help you reduce your digital footprint and minimize security risks by improving your cloud compliance management workflows. It provides good audits to ensure your systems comply with the latest GDPR/CCPA guidelines.
SentinelOne CNAPP is a cloud-native application protection platform that provides enterprises with Behavioral AI and Static AI engines for machine-speed malware and threat analysis. It comes with a Singularity Data Lake, Compliance Dashboard, SBOM (Software Bill of Materials), IaC Scanning, and Offensive Security Engine. SentinelOne enhances the security of your cloud-native applications and protects cloud VMs, servers, and containers. It provides an AI-powered agent-based Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) with Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM), Cloud Detection & Response (CDR), and Cloud Data Security (CDS) platform.
With Purple AI & Binary Vault, you can extend your cloud security capabilities to include world-class threat intelligence, deep forensic analysis, and direct integrations with other security tools and workflows. SentinelOne supports multiple cloud compliance management standards like PCI-DSS, NIST, ISO 27001, CIS Benchmark, and many more. It helps you build a Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) and implements the principle of least-privilege access across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. You can proactively identify unknown or hidden vulnerabilities and run routine agentless vulnerability scans across your entire cloud estate. Its 1-click automated remediation is a very useful feature and SentinelOne offers rapid incident response capabilities to speed up remediation actions during events of crises.
Firms can comply with legal obligations and regulations by using its compliance reporting features and analytics. There are strong access restrictions and authentication procedures to ensure that only authorized individuals can access cloud services and data.
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Focusing on your cloud compliance management strategy can yield great results for your organization. It is pivotal for boosting your cloud security posture and shouldn’t be neglected. Now that you’re aware of the best implementation practices and know what to watch out for, you can start working on your current cloud estate.
Use SentinelOne to supercharge your cloud compliance management today.
FAQs
The main components of cloud compliance are – data governance, change control, identity and access management (IAM), continuous monitoring, vulnerability management, and reporting. Cloud compliance evaluates the configurations of cloud environments and ensures they are set up properly to reduce the possibility of potential vulnerabilities. It assigns roles and defines access rights, ownerships, and responsibilities to assets and services. A cloud compliance strategy can continuously monitor root accounts, implement filters, and alarms, and even disable accounts if needed. It employs role-based access controls and group-level privileges that align with business requirements. It can also deactivate dormant cloud accounts and enforce robust credential and key management policies to enhance cloud security.
Cloud compliance regulations are a set of standards or guidelines that describe how data on the cloud should be stored, processed, managed, and deleted. They are particularly useful for audit purposes and lay out a system that serves as a valuable compliance footprint. In short, a regulation made for a cloud compliance strategy will offer critical evidence and create reports that can be forwarded to stakeholders who will then use it for making key business decisions.
There are many types of cloud compliance regulations followed by organizations such as:
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
- Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP)
- PCI DSS or Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard
- Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
- Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX)
- International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
- Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)