Moving to the Cloud Creates New Risks. The Cloud Should Add Value, Not Exposure

Adoption of cloud computing is at the heart of most organizations’ digital transformation strategies. Whether they seek to modernize IT infrastructure, connect with customers on digital platforms or automate core business processes, organizations increasingly rely on an expanding array of public, private and hybrid cloud services to meet these objectives.

And why not? The cloud is known for giving organizations more budget flexibility and for conferring them with greater scalability and agility. But without appropriate controls, cloud applications and services can introduce security risks.

Increased Access Complexity

As organizations move applications and IT infrastructure to the cloud, the traditional network perimeter, an internally secured boundary, disappears, increasing access risk. Cloud adoption also creates multiple identity stores over which security teams have little control, further complicating identity and access management.

Decreased Visibility

In addition to dealing with increased access complexity, security teams lack visibility into their organizations’ complex, multicloud environments. The lack of unified visibility and control hampers their ability to proactively address cloud-based security risks.

Governance Challenges

As organizations continue to shift more data, services and applications to cloud providers, risks multiply, making an effective third-party risk management and governance program essential. However, these programs can be difficult to initiate and operate without leadership and technology support.

What to Do: Implement Risk-based Access Controls

Whether your organization uses a single cloud environment or operates across a multi-cloud environment, implementing access controls that provide the right access to the right users at the right times is critical.

The more disparate and varied your cloud environment becomes, the more difficult it can be to monitor access and the more often issues can arise. Thus, it’s important for organizations to implement a solution that allows them to balance availability, reliability and security.

An effective access control system should provide your organization with the following four capabilities:

1.

Unified visibility and control across your application and resource landscape, so you can holistically manage users and access from a single application, reducing blind spots and minimizing risk.

2.

The ability to manage blended cloud and on-premises, bring your-own-device and mobile environments, allowing employees, partners and contractors to do more without compromising security or convenience.

3.

Support for an identity assurance strategy that enables users to access applications quickly and easily without sacrificing security.

4.

A modern, risk-based, multi-factor authentication engine that doesn’t require step-up authentication unless it identifies risky behavior, thereby allowing a majority of users to gain seamless access to the data, services or applications they need from any device, anywhere.

Secure Your Cloud Transformation with RSA

RSA provides a unified approach to managing the identity and access risk that stems from using multiple cloud providers. We do this by providing the following key capabilities for tackling identity and access risk:

  • Multi-factor authentication
  • Single sign-on (SSO) capability
  • Risk-based authentication, including anomaly detection
  • Path to a passwordless future, including FIDO authentication
  • Full complement of modern authentication methods
  • Identity governance and lifecycle management

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