Multi-Cloud Environments: Mitigating Access Control Risks

An overview

A rapid adoption of multi-cloud platforms among global enterprises is changing the Identity and Access Management (IAM/ IDAM) fabric including the identity governance and entitlement policies. 

Indeed, nowadays, almost three out of four businesses adopt multi-cloud platforms. It helps enterprises to meet the requirements arising from increasing daily IT computational, operational and infrastructure use cases through various cloud platforms such as the AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. 

The question is how to effectively and securely govern the identities and access control mechanisms across these multi-cloud environments. It is not just the human identities that need to be protected but machine identities/non-human identities (devices and cloud workloads such as scripts, containers, VMs, CI/CD tools, RPA tools) have to be controlled and governed. 

With hundreds or thousands of human and non-human (digital) identities accessing cloud resources, consoles, and workloads for day-to-day use cases, the emerging IT security challenges have left enterprises open to the data breach risks. 

The third party risks and insider threats have increased significantly even as the costs of data breach, non-compliance penalties (FEDRAMP, GDPR, SOC 2 among many others), cyber espionage, and even human error can be unfathomable. 

Why is Identity Governance necessary in multi-cloud environments?

As cloud infrastructure scales up everywhere, organizations are facing new challenges in cloud identity management. It is practically impossible to manage the growing number of identities of both end-users and service providers manually. 

In typical scenarios, it is quite common to see multiple cloud consoles with thousands of machine identities, and end-user identities. The threat surface, as a result, expands exponentially due to lack of access controls. 

Moreover, each cloud console has its own policy definitions for access control. As a result, it becomes a humongous challenge for the IT security staff to manage, monitor and control the increasing number of identities in the multi-cloud setup. 

In many cases, enterprises end up creating several over privileged identities or privileged cloud entitlements that are never revoked due to the lack of IT visibility. Managing  multiple cloud consoles increases administrative challenges. In other words, there is no single interface to administer the cloud entitlements spread across many cloud platforms. 

How does it ensure security?

To successfully manage the multi-cloud posture, strong identity governance (discovery of users and machines with privileged entitlements, assigning entitlements, policy definitions) with seamless monitoring through a centralized access control interface, and restrictions of any-time access to the cloud console is highly imperative. Equally important is to have  strong password management policies for users along with Just-In-Time access to tokens, keys and certificates for ensuring secure access to secrets and DevOps tools. 

How does ARCON help in Reinforcing Cloud Entitlement Governance?

ARCON offers a highly effective cloud entitlements management and governance platform, ARCON | Cloud Governance to build a robust security framework in multi-cloud platforms. 

The solution provides a centralized platform to manage, monitor and control the increasing number of identities spread across multiple platforms. It ensures complete visibility over every end-user and non-human identity access. Besides, it discovers all privileged identities in the cloud environments and controls entitlements as per the policies.  

In a nutshell, the solution empowers IT administrators and enterprise security staff to have comprehensive control over the entitlements and workloads in both single and multi-cloud instances. 

The over privileged users with excessive entitlements are controlled by this solution. It  also ensures instant policy enforcement to detect and mitigate insider and third-party threats. Hence, the compliance framework is strengthened automatically with the deployment of this solution.

Moreover, security features such as Multi-factor Authentication (MFA), Just-in-Time (JIT) Access, Single Sign-On (SSO), granular level monitoring of every session, User discovery & User mapping (for entitlements), Audit trails and reporting help organizations reinforce the best, adequate and relevant IT security posture for cloud environments. 

Instead of offering excessive and needless privileged rights to create, delete or change configurations of network & storage devices, this solution helps to revoke the entitlements of the super users on time. This way it builds the foundation for a strong Identity and Access Management framework in a multi-cloud environment.

Conclusion

Governing identity is important to protect a multi-cloud environment. The lack of cloud entitlement governance can lead to a devastating data breach and malign the reputation of an organization. 

Implementing cloud-based identity governance like ARCON | Cloud Governance can yield several IT security benefits in the modern IT infrastructure. 

Starting from simplifying the cloud entitlement processes and practices, the solution manages, controls and secures access requests, password reset requests, user provisioning/ de-provisioning and discovery of privileged accounts.