How Are You Tackling Cloud Compliance?

Within the race towards the cloud, I’ve observed a disturbing trend. Daily, I talk to organizations which have moved production workloads to cloud IaaS providers but haven’t yet addressed the way they will manage, measure and set of regulatory compliance controls. Among all of the concerns over whether public clouds feel at ease, some organizations missed a vital question:

Are we able to demonstrate compliance without overworking our teams along the way?

It isn't surprising it has had an impending PCI or SOC 2 audit for SecOps and risk and compliance teams to possess a reckoning about how exactly they'll appraise the compliance of the cloud infrastructure. Not have a lot of people within an organization had the ability to create changes towards the infrastructure that may potentially go unchecked. To help complicate things, traditional tools which help with compliance within the data center can't be utilized in the API-centric realm of the cloud. Without tools created for the cloud, teams have to navigate tiresome, manual ways to produce proof of technical compliance controls over the dynamic and fast-altering cloud infrastructure. Sure, you are able to prove that sooner or later you passed the controls, what was the problem 24 hrs before or more days after? Point-in-time compliance just doesn’t work any longer.

With tales of cyber risk, cybercrime, online hackers and breaches topping our news feeds every day, organizations need so that you can demonstrate a continuing practice of managing security. Just like DevOps teams now utilize “continuous delivery” and “continuous innovation” making them an element of the everyday IT language, “continuous security” and “continuous compliance” have to be just like frequent discussion topics.

The good thing is, unlike managing compliance in traditional data centers, modern infrastructure provides for us a way to addressing security and compliance programmatically and instantly. The APIs we've available enable another era of security automation. While using APIs, you have access to metadata regarding your infrastructure and continuously monitor and measure if the changes that occur are presenting new risks to your atmosphere. The development of technology particularly made to help streamline and automate the entire process of security assessment and removal for that cloud have advanced how organizations manage their security posture and compliance processes.

Using Automation to handle Compliance

For DevOps teams, using automation to handle security means they may also manage compliance through the entire development lifecycle, instead of accumulating a backlog of compliance debt that needs removal before delivery. The cloud has additionally permitted DevOps to codify both security and compliance, which reduces risk by making certain guidelines are adopted, and changes to infrastructure and also the cloud atmosphere stick to their organization’s security policies.

Automation of compliance also enables teams to streamline the entire process of documenting and certifying the accounts, services and workloads within the cloud once the auditors come knocking. This automation will help you create an abstraction layer to safeguard your operations and development teams from disruption and distraction, which could in addition have a significant negative effect on your timelines and main point here. With the proper cloud security tools in position, you are able to provide auditors read-only use of compliance reports when needed, eliminating the requirement for team people to become in the center of individuals demands.

So, while your senior management may wonder if a cloud provider is FISMA-, HIPAA- or PCI-compliant, you have to raise yet another issue: how can your business demonstrate compliance running in a number of public clouds? You must have a warranty you will get executive support to include new tools for your arsenal that can help your team manage, assess and set of security and compliance without having to stop innovation and creating harmful workloads for the development and processes teams.