The rapid shift to remote work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated cloud adoption, forcing many organizations to launch their services into the cloud faster than they might have planned. But hasty transitions can lead IT teams to neglect compliance, leading to hefty fines and damage to customer trust and reputation.
Even in the best of circumstances, compliance is a moving target. Governmental institutions have responded to the mass cloud adoption by developing new data privacy and regulatory laws, and compliance organizations continue to create more relevant frameworks for cloud computing.
As more organizations migrate to the cloud, compliance standards and rules will evolve in tandem. That’s why it’s critical to implement a scalable security strategy that can grow throughout your migration and keep up with compliance requirements.
Let’s take a look at some of the basics of cloud compliance.
Compliance 101
Compliance seems intimidating, but at its core, it’s relatively straightforward. In the case of cloud compliance, organizations must have the proper procedures in place to meet regulations applicable to their industry, such as GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO and others. There are also compliance standards and frameworks like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, CIS Benchmarks™ and AWS Well-Architected Framework that aren’t mandatory but are great tools to help you stay on the good side of the other guys.
While compliance laws and standards may differ across industries and regions, they often address the same challenges:
- Data transfer: You must abide by the applicable national and regional privacy regulations when moving your data.
- Data visibility: While the hybrid cloud approach is widespread, storage distribution can make securing it more complex.
- Data security responsibility: In the cloud, the shared responsibility model dictates that you are 100% responsible for securing your data and therefore 100% accountable for compliance.
- Data access: Compliance regulations are designed to help you limit access to a least-privilege level so you can avoid a breach.
How to Achieve Continuous Compliance
The first step is identifying which security tool will best meet the needs of ever-changing compliance standards. To keep up with your evolving infrastructure, a comprehensive security services platform can help you meet the four compliance challenges mentioned above:
Challenge #1: Data Transfer – Localized Protection
Deploy across multi- and hybrid-cloud environments so you can run continuous scans and audits to ensure compliance, wherever your data may be.
Challenge #2: Data Visibility – Enhanced Insights
Enhance visibility across networks, security layers and more so compliance issues can be identified and remediated quickly.
Challenge #3: Data Security Responsibility – Automated Guardrails
Automate the tedious manual monitoring, configuration, and maintenance activities that keep your systems compliant. Automated operational controls also ensure rules are enforced at scale—so you stay compliant as your business grows.
Challenge #4: Data Access – Centralized Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Manage all your permissions, accounts, passwords and policies from one console.
The next step is identifying which platform is best. There’s no shortage of offerings available, but they’re not all equal. To achieve your compliance goals, look for specific features and functions, including:
- Intrusion detection and protection for each sever across every type of cloud environment, examining all incoming and outgoing traffic for protocol and policy violations or content that signals an attack.
- Virtual patching provides an extra layer of security against vulnerabilities while you wait for the official vendor patch. This helps you avoid any additional exploits that try to target the vulnerability
- Integrity monitoring for critical operation system and application files (directories, registry keys and values) to detect and report unexpected changes in real-time.
- Malware prevention that leverages file reputation, behavioral analysis, machine learning (ML) and other advanced techniques to protect your systems
- Localized data centers/specific compliance measures across the broadest range of industry, geography and cybersecurity regulations and standards
- Advanced threat intelligence as part of the platform for visibility into the entire threats landscape to protect against current and future threats.
Automate Compliance with Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Conformity
In the cloud computing world, conforming to compliance standards and regulations sets you up for success. Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Conformity can help you follow the rules to avoid breaches and fines while driving innovation and bridging the gap. Trend Micro Cloud One – Conformity is one element of a cybersecurity platform solution that provides the breadth, depth and innovation required to meet and manage your cloud security needs today and in the future.
With seven cloud security components under the Cloud One umbrella, you can protect some aspects of your cloud environment or all of it. Trend Micro Cloud One allows you to ensure compliance, secure workloads, containers, file storage, applications and your cloud network layer and provides visibility and monitoring of open-source vulnerabilities and license risks. Go hands-on and learn how to protect any or all of these elements with a free 30-day trial of Trend Micro Cloud One.
