The Importance of Cloud Security and Compliance for Your Business

It’s becoming a story we’re all too familiar with: even one cloud security incident, usually arising out of a badly implemented cloud compliance policy can send a company on a downward spiral with legal fees, customer anger (or worse, customer loss), and bad press.

In the past couple of years, we’ve seen the story played out multiple times. The cloud “master keys” exposed at Accenture. Over a million voter records exposed on an Amazon S3 bucket in the RoboCent incident. ISP Pocket iNet leaving 73 gigabytes of critical data exposed in a misconfigured Amazon S3 storage bucket.

Security and policy compliance is so critical that it’s leaving IT leaders wondering if they can adopt a multi-cloud strategy without suffering the same fate.

Storing business data in a public cloud is not without risks, especially if your team is new to the cloud environment. Although cloud service providers have tools and processes to secure cloud infrastructure, ensuring security in the cloud may be quite different than what you're used to on-prem. Now add in multiple cloud providers — private, public, distributed, and edge — and the security situation becomes that much more complex, with a higher risk of making mistakes.

How can you be sure that your security and compliance standards will be met before you move workloads and data to a public cloud?

Take a Cloud Security-First Approach

First things first: take a security-first approach that achieves a state of continuous cloud compliance. This will lower costs, minimize risks, and reduce the complexity of cloud operations.

A security-first model maintains continuous monitoring and management of cloud security risks and threats, leveraging tools and automation that:

• Monitors security threats through real-time discovery
• Understands security threats through deep insights
• Acts on threats through automated policies, processes, and controls
• Measures security and compliance results with robust reporting capabilities

Consider the platform

In a security-first approach, you need a multi-cloud platform that continuously monitors and manages cloud security against your set policies and compliance standards, providing:

• A complete and unified view of all cloud accounts
• Generation of regular compliance reports
• Identification, prioritization, and remediation of compliance risks
• End-to-end lifecycle compliance monitoring
• Audit reports that demonstrate round-the-clock security management and compliance

Ensuring Continuous Cloud Security & Compliance with Beam

Nutanix Beam safeguards the security of your cloud infrastructure and data. A single, integrated platform for cost, security, and operations enables you to gain complete control over cloud environments.

Beam provides continuous security and compliance for multi-cloud deployments. Advanced, automated cloud health checks are easily monitored so you can ensure security compliance. You gain deep insights into your multi-cloud environment based on over 250 health checks and security best practices. Beam enables continuous security management using built-in templates that certify and maintain industry standards such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, CIS, SOC-2, NiST, and ISO.

Cloud Governance from a Single Pane of Glass

Beam’s Security & Compliance Dashboard provides snapshots of any cloud security and compliance issues. The issues are monitored, tracked, and compiled in the form of infographics on the dashboard to give you a summary picture. These summaries provide everything you need to know about the state of your cloud security.

Audits of your infrastructure alert you to the nature and number of risks. Your cloud health score is fully visible, so you can understand how compliant all your operations are. Types of reports include:

Cloud Security Summary

Pictorial representations on the dashboard provide easily readable and understandable data on the total number of security and compliance issues. These are based on severity levels and broken-down regionally.

Cloud Compliance Summary

An integrated compliance view gives the overall health score, the total number of checks against compliance, the number of passes, and classified failures based on severity levels.

Security Compliance by Policy

Real-time risk correlation tracks real-time security and compliance vulnerabilities and tracks compliance against set policies. You can automatically monitor multiple cloud compliance policies such as PCI-DSS and HIPAA. Gain insights into your default policy, performance policy, disaster recovery policy, and more. Resolve security vulnerabilities with one-click remediation.

In-Depth Metrics and Reports

Beam offers additional in-depth and automated metrics and reports on your multi-cloud infrastructure, ensuring the security, health, and policy compliance of your cloud infrastructure.

Policy compliance metrics provide the number of current vulnerabilities. Overall metrics are broken down into critical vulnerabilities, a security compliance summary, and recent vulnerabilities, allowing you to track everything in detail. Real-time scans of your cloud compliance identify risks and security violations. With these reports, you can assess and mitigate vulnerabilities in real-time as you implement comprehensive security management for your multi-cloud environment.

Beam’s cloud security and policy compliance capabilities include:

• Audit Reports.
  Audits provide security reports with one-click remediation. The system runs an automated daily audit, and you can run a custom audit at any time from within Beam. Reports are further classified based on categories, set policies, and groups. Click on the “View Issues” button to see links to issues needing to be resolved.
• Remediation History.
  Real-time risk correlation and real-time security reveal vulnerabilities that can be resolved with powerful click-to-fix remediation in seconds. The remediation history shows a fully traceable audit trail with a detailed record of all security issues, including those that have been fixed.
• Custom Policy Configurations.
  You can create custom audits with definable policy parameters for even more control over compliance. Beam can also monitor multiple cloud compliance policies based on industry standards.

Beam Is Here to Help

Nutanix Beam’s simple but powerful tools make implementing continuous security and compliance a cinch. Beam’s multi-cloud governance protects your infrastructure now and in the future, helping you make important business decisions and optimizing cloud costs. Beam’s cloud security & compliance automation is available for 14-day trial and you can get 250+ cloud security audits for free here!