Multi-Cloud Security: Challenges & Best Practices

A multi-cloud environment allows you greater flexibility than you would find with one cloud platform. It helps manage your costs, avoid vendor lock-in, and improve your organization’s resiliency. 

Multi-cloud security requires careful planning and appropriate tools. The complexity of multi-cloud deployments has the potential to increase the attack surface as well as the risk of cyberattacks, overall posing several security challenges.

Understanding Multi-Cloud Security Challenges

Misconfigured Cloud Configurations or Architecture 

When companies migrate workloads to the cloud, they might face misconfigured security or privacy settings. Configuring cloud services can be complicated, and even the best network administrator can make mistakes. 

Access Control

User access control management becomes more challenging in multi-cloud environments. Cloud providers have built-in controls for managing roles, user authorization, and access privileges, but a multi-cloud security strategy requires you to manage multiple user access systems. Ensuring policies stay consistent across platforms is difficult without a centralized control system.

Patch Management

It is essential to update your systems to ensure you patch any known vulnerabilities. You also must ensure your workloads use the latest versions of any dependencies. Multi-cloud environments necessitate that you deal with specific vulnerabilities. They also require you to patch schedules, update each platform's procedures, and ensure all instances are up-to-date. This logistical challenge can cause some IT teams to develop bad habits if they are not vigilant. 

Visibility

A common issue in cloud security is visibility, which complicates further with multi-cloud. Third-party cloud providers won’t allow you access to every layer of the cloud computing stack, meaning you might not know about all the security bugs. Some cloud providers use built-in security monitoring systems, but they still might not provide you with complete visibility or granular logging. Managing several built-in monitoring tools simultaneously can become challenging in a multi-cloud environment.

Data Governance

Today, most companies process so much data that data governance poses a massive challenge. When you use multi-cloud, this challenge increases exponentially. You will need a robust data governance strategy to ensure the applications, processes, and users can access the data while keeping it secure.

Shared Responsibility Model

In a shared responsibility model, you are responsible for certain aspects of cloud security, and your provider is responsible for others. The line can vary from provider to provider and service to service, so don't assume every platform in your multi-cloud environment is automatically secure.

The Security Advantage with Synopsys Cloud

Despite many cloud providers' improvements in security, startups and chip designers are still hesitant to develop chips in multi-cloud environments.

Without robust security, cloud-based chip design and verification can't succeed. Chip designers, therefore, need to integrate security into the design process to protect the chip development life cycle, infrastructure, and platforms.

Synopsys Cloud offers a variety of cloud-based chip design and verification solutions, all of which are backed by our commitment to security. Our cloud-optimized EDA and IP solutions provide comprehensive cloud security as customers migrate to the cloud.