What Is Multi-Cloud Security?

Multi-cloud security, defined

Multi-cloud security encompasses the tools, processes, and strategies organizations use to identify, manage, and mitigate security risks across multiple cloud platforms or environments. It ensures that the disparate security measures, configurations, and policies of different cloud providers are unified to provide consistent protection.

For example, if you deploy some applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS) others on Microsoft Azure, and still others on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), a multi-cloud security strategy aims to identify vulnerabilities, prevent threats, and ensure compliance across all these environments. This approach enables organizations to maintain a centralized, cohesive view of their security posture while leveraging the unique benefits of each cloud platform.

Note that multi-cloud security should not be confused with hybrid cloud security. The latter term involves managing risks within architectures that combine public cloud services with private data centers or on-premises infrastructure. Although both share some security challenges, such as data transfer protection and access management, the architectural differences necessitate tailored approaches.

Multi-cloud security challenges

To understand why multi-cloud security is important, you must first understand the unique security challenges that arise when an organization uses multiple public clouds.

At a high level, those challenges can be summed up as “more clouds lead to more complexity, which leads to more risk.” But to be more specific, using multiple clouds can lead to security challenges such as:

• Inconsistent controls: Typically, each cloud platform has its own services (such as Identity and Access Management (IAM) frameworks) for enforcing security and compliance controls. As a result, there is a built-in set of controls that work across all of your cloud platforms.
• Lack of centralized visibility: Along similar lines, each cloud typically offers monitoring and auditing solutions that only work within the cloud on which they are based. This makes it difficult to gain centralized visibility into security risks across clouds.
• Multiple user accounts and identities: The more cloud platforms you use, the more sets of user accounts and identities you need to create. This can heighten risks because it increases the chances of making mistakes – like failing to follow the principle of least privilege – when configuring accounts and access controls.
• Network security risks: While the network can be a vector of attack in any cloud environment, multi-cloud network security presents special risks due to the high volume of data that tends to move across the network between clouds. The more data you move, the greater the risk that threat actors may intercept and misuse it, especially if the data is not encrypted.
• Scattered data: Multi-cloud architectures also heighten data security risks in the respect that the more clouds you use to store information, the harder it is to track all of your sensitive data and ensure that it is properly managed and secured.
• Increased attack surface: Every additional cloud platform introduces new endpoints, APIs, and services that expand the attack surface, increasing the complexity of coordinating security across platforms.
• Cross-cloud threat propagation: Threats like malware or ransomware can spread rapidly between interconnected cloud environments, especially when inadequate segmentation or access controls exist.
• Complex compliance requirements: Different cloud providers often operate in diverse geographic regions with varying regulatory requirements, making compliance across multiple jurisdictions challenging.
• Difficulty automating security processes: Differing APIs, configurations, and toolsets between cloud platforms make it hard to implement seamless automation for security processes.

Benefits of multi-cloud security

The main benefit of multi-cloud security is that it allows organizations to take full advantage of multi-cloud architectures – which can offer benefits like lower costs and greater reliability – while keeping security risks in check.

• Enhanced security posture: Multi-cloud security provides comprehensive protection by identifying and mitigating risks across all cloud platforms, ensuring no vulnerabilities go undetected due to siloed tools or inconsistent policies.

• Compliance support: Multi-cloud security helps organizations meet regulatory and industry compliance requirements by enabling centralized monitoring, reporting, and enforcement of security policies across diverse cloud platforms.
• Centralized visibility and management: Unified dashboards and tools allow for simplified monitoring and risk management across all clouds, ensuring consistent policy enforcement and operational efficiency.

How do multi-cloud security solutions work?

Multi-cloud security solutions typically work by providing a centralized, unified interface that security teams can use to detect and manage risks and threats regardless of the cloud environment where they originate. They do this by providing a number of key capabilities that work across cloud platforms, including:

• Monitoring cloud service configurations: Continuously audits cloud settings to identify risks like misconfigurations, overly permissive access, and unencrypted data.
• Application vulnerability scanning: Detects weaknesses in cloud-deployed applications, such as unpatched software or exploitable code vulnerabilities.
• Network traffic analysis: Monitors network data for signs of malicious activity, such as unusual patterns or unauthorized access attempts.
• Threat detection and response: Leverages real-time threat intelligence and automation to identify and mitigate security risks across cloud platforms.
• Compliance reporting: Generates tailored compliance reports to demonstrate adherence to regulatory requirements across multiple cloud platforms.
• Integration with security ecosystems: Seamlessly integrates with existing security tools like SIEMs and DevSecOps pipelines for a unified security approach.

How to choose a multi-cloud security solution

Many cloud security platforms today support multiple clouds and offer the same basic features, but they vary when it comes to advanced capabilities and risk management techniques. To ensure that your multi-cloud security offering is as powerful as possible, look for features like the following:

• Complete support for all cloud platforms and services you use: This is important because although some solutions may claim to offer basic support for a given cloud platform, they may not work with all of the services or configurations available on that platform.
• The ability to prioritize risks based on severity level: Prioritization helps your team determine which threats matter most so they can use their time and resources efficiently.
• Centralized but granular alerting and reporting: While being able to view security data through a central portal is important, you also want to ensure that alerts and reports are granular enough to allow you to trace issues to the specific cloud platform and service where they originated.
• Integration with other security tools: While multi-cloud security solutions address risks associated with multi-cloud architectures, you’ll typically also want to use other types of tools – such as application security scanners – to discover other risks. The better your multi-cloud security tools integrate with the rest of your tool chain, the more efficiently you can move data between tools and create a set of automated, scalable security processes.
• Automation and scalability: Look for a solution that supports automated security processes like vulnerability scanning, compliance checks, and incident response. Automation streamlines repetitive tasks, reducing manual effort and minimizing the risk of human error, while scalability ensures that your security infrastructure can grow alongside your multi-cloud environment without compromising protection.
• Real-time threat detection and response: The ability to detect and respond to threats in real time is critical in multi-cloud environments, where threats can evolve rapidly. Advanced machine learning and AI-driven analytics help identify emerging threats and automatically mitigate them, ensuring minimal downtime and risk exposure.
• Unified workload protection: A multi-cloud security solution should protect all types of workloads, including containers, serverless functions, and virtual machines, ensuring end-to-end protection for modern cloud architectures.

Best practices for a secure multi-cloud architecture

While deploying an effective multi-cloud security solution is one step toward protecting your multi-cloud environment, you can enhance security further by designing a multi-cloud architecture based on principles and practices like the following:

• Standardize tools and configurations across clouds: Utilize the same Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) platform to provision and manage all cloud environments. This standardization ensures consistency in configurations, policies, and security baselines. Additionally, employing consistent IaC templates can help automate security checks and reduce the risk of misconfigurations.
• Encrypt data by default: Ensure all cloud services automatically encrypt data at rest and in transit. Use strong encryption protocols and manage encryption keys securely, ideally through a centralized key management service. This prevents unauthorized access to sensitive data, even if it is intercepted or exposed.
• Define clear governance policies: Establish comprehensive governance policies to determine where specific workloads and data should reside across your multi-cloud environment. For instance, mandate that sensitive data only be stored on pre-approved, highly secure services. Clear policies reduce the risk of data sprawl and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.
• Automate security and compliance processes: Leverage automation for repetitive and critical tasks, such as vulnerability scanning, compliance checks, access audits, and incident response. Automation not only increases operational efficiency but also minimizes human error, which is a major source of security risks.
• Monitor cross-cloud traffic and activity: Deploy network monitoring tools that provide visibility into traffic flows and user activity across all cloud environments. This helps detect anomalous behavior, unauthorized access attempts, or potential data exfiltration in real time.
• Enforce network segmentation: Use network segmentation to isolate sensitive workloads and minimize the potential blast radius of a breach. Implement security groups, firewalls, and virtual private clouds (VPCs) to enforce segmentation between environments.
• Adopt a zero-trust architecture: Implement a zero-trust security model where no user or device is inherently trusted, regardless of their location. Continuously verify all access requests, enforce least privilege access, and ensure all communication is encrypted.
• Use threat intelligence to stay proactive: Integrate real-time threat intelligence into your multi-cloud security framework to stay ahead of emerging threats. This enables you to proactively update policies and configurations to address new vulnerabilities.

Multi-cloud security with Aqua

As a cloud-agnostic security platform, Aqua helps you detect and manage security risks no matter which or how many clouds you use. Aqua provides a single, centralized console to streamline risk detection and remediation across all of your cloud services and workloads.

Learn more by reading about Aqua multi-cloud use cases or requesting a demo.