Enterprises are embracing cloud technologies to drive innovation, modernize their IT infrastructure, and ultimately, digitize their business.
When it comes to hosting sensitive and regulated workloads on the public cloud, enterprises (particularly those in highly regulated industries) are being forced to take a hard look at their approach to managing security and compliance—consistently and continuously.
According to a recent Gartner study, the challenge is not whether the cloud is secure, but if it’s being used securely. The study points out that “99 percent of cloud security failures” will be based how customers are using cloud. When it comes to hosting regulated workloads, meeting regulatory compliance requirements are important. A Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report—Global Risk 2017: Staying the Course in Banking—indicates that between 2009 and 2017, there was an estimated $321B in penalties paid by the banks for not meeting regulations. In order to effectively manage their risk and compliance, enterprises need to define the set of cloud native security controls that they want their teams to implement. More importantly, they have to ensure that those controls are in place and that their workloads are properly configured to meet those security controls.
While enterprises are aware of this problem, the challenge is often the effort required to consistently verify and ensure that the right configurations and controls are in place—particularly in an IT environment that is rapidly growing and continuously changing. Manual audits and checks simply do not scale for this, making it imperative that enterprises adopt automation to consistently apply security controls and continuously monitor their security and compliance posture.