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Why You Need to Align Your Cloud Strategy to Your Business Goals

Your company has decided to adopt the Cloud. Or maybe it was among the first ones that decided to rely on virtualized environments before it was even a thing. In either case, cloud security has to be managed. How do you go about that?

Before checking out vendor marketing materials in search of the perfect technology solution, let’s step back and think of it from a governance perspective. In an enterprise like yours, there are a number of business functions and departments with various level of autonomy. Do you trust them to manage business process-specific risk or choose to relieve them from this burden by setting security control objectives and standards centrally? Or maybe something in-between?

Centralized Model

Managing security centrally allows you to uniformly project your security strategy and guiding policy across all departments. This is especially useful when aiming to achieve alignment across business functions. It helps when your customers, products or services are similar across the company, but even if not, centralised governance and clear accountability may reduce duplication of work through streamlining the processes and cost-effective use of people and technology (if organized in a central pool).

If one of the departments is struggling financially or is less profitable, the centralized approach ensures that overall risk is still managed appropriately and security is not neglected. This point is especially important when considering a security incident (e.g. due to misconfigured access permissions) that may affect the whole company.

Responding to incidents, in general, may be simplified not only from the reporting perspective but also by making sure due process is followed with appropriate oversight.

There are, of course, some drawbacks. In the effort to come up with a uniform policy, you may end up in a situation where it loses its appeal. It’s now perceived as (Read more...)