Use this guide to discover the most essential cloud controls to master. Learn how to maintain ownership, enhance security, and optimize vendor performance while navigating the complexities of cloud computing.
Cloud control is about retaining command of your systems when you turn them over to a cloud provider. You want to be the one who manages and assigns all the data and technologies in the cloud environment, not your third-party provider. However, it’s very easy to lose control, especially if:
- You don’t own the assets.
- You can’t physically touch the hardware where the code or data resides.
- When something goes wrong, you can’t “brute force” your way to a solution by throwing a small army of IT professionals at the problem.
How to Maintain Cloud Control (and Still Reap Benefits)
Other Cloud Control Considerations
The Balance Between Control, Agility and Innovation
How to Maintain Cloud Control (and Still Reap Benefits)
Let’s get into a few cloud control strategies to be aware of:
Asset Ownership
Outsourcing computing and network power to the cloud lets you free up capital for other purposes while ensuring applications keep running “round-the-clock.”
Services (backups, failover, recovery, redundancy) are limited by the hardware that you purchase. But by “renting” computing power from the cloud, you’ll get a higher level of service than what you can own.
Cloud tools also empower you to configure point-in-time scaling and failover solutions so you can mitigate risks and quickly address any problematic issues.
Designate particular roles and permissions to put asset ownership in control of access to cloud resources. The Cloud Asset Owner role grants complete access to cloud asset metadata and to the application programming interface (API), including all permissions and methods. The Cloud Asset Viewer role grants read-only access to the metadata.
While there are other lesser, basic roles that grant permissions – i.e., Owner, Editor and Viewer – it’s safer to choose one of the two Cloud Asset roles because the basic roles have multiple permissions for other Google Cloud services that might expose data to unintended access.
Security
While security represents one of the most critical cloud challenges, cloud providers can provide a large team of security experts who constantly work to secure the cloud system. This is also an area where customer and vendor interests are closely aligned. Physical security in cloud-hosting data centers will nearly always exceed the level of security obtainable by hosting your environment on-premise. Cloud vendors simply have a greater capacity to implement robust security measures.
Cloud security controls are the mechanisms and procedures that safeguard data, applications, and infrastructure within the cloud from all manner of cyber breaches, and they include everything from encryption to incident response protocols. They are central to the overarching issue of cloud control because they point to the oft-neglected responsibility of cloud customers to vigilantly enforce security control.
Gartner reports that cloud users, not providers, are almost always the ones who fail to manage cloud security controls and that by 2025 “99 percent of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.”
To effectively manage this responsibility and mitigate cloud challenges, businesses can apply several types of cloud security controls:
- Deterrent controls, such as warning banners and visible security mechanisms, can intimidate potential attackers by indicating that strong security measures are in place
- Preventive controls, such as access controls and network segmentation, can pre-empt security incidents by shrinking the attack surface and blocking unauthorized activities
- Detective controls, including intrusion detection systems, security monitoring instruments, and log analysis, identify and report security incidents that are in progress
- Corrective controls, including incident response plans, backup and recovery procedures, and patch management, are response-and-recovery actions that can limit the damage from a cyber invasion and quickly restore normal operations
While the areas mentioned above help maintain cloud control, you should consider additional factors to achieve the desired level of oversight and overcome common concerns.
Other Cloud Control Considerations
Vendor Performance and Cost
If a business moves its systems to a cloud vendor, will it be at the mercy of a big cloud company that will run up prices or provide poor service? Must it commit to a long-term contract to get pricing that is competitive with what it could provide in its own data center?
Fortunately, with cloud services, there are competitive components embedded into the system to mitigate these risks and concerns:
Contracts – Many plans are short-term (12 months or less) or pay-as-you-go. Since vendors provide widely available cloud computing power on a commodity basis, long-term contracts are uncommon.
When negotiating a contract with a cloud vendor, a business should insist on clauses that allow it to modify, renew, or end the contract and that specify the vendor’s responsibility for data security, privacy, compliance, and disaster recovery.
Tooling – There are software tools that enable multicloud solutions, so you can use multiple vendors or migrate to a different cloud provider should your current partner not work out.
Vendors offer cloud services in a standardized fashion, which allows for portability, so you’re not locked into a particular platform. This gives you much more flexibility than if your systems were situated with a hosting provider or a shared data center.
Whatever vendor your organization selects, you should use key performance indicators (KPIs), audits, and feedback surveys to evaluate the vendor’s performance.
The above strategies for keeping control of the cloud aren’t the last word on the subject of cloud control. Far from it. Just as businesses must evolve and expand their understanding of cloud computing capabilities and the potential for ongoing technological refinement of cloud platforms, so must they adopt a nimble mindset about how much cloud control encompasses, how that is growing and changing over time, and what they should do keep abreast of the curve.
Let’s take a deeper into the dynamic universe of cloud control knowledge.
More Mature, Precise and Detailed Cloud Control
Just as cloud migration has evolved in sophistication and the sheer size of the cloud universe, cloud control has become more expansive and innovative.
Cloud-native deployment maturation has resulted in more precise, detailed control over feature management, resulting in better performance and considerable cost savings. A shift in this area from infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to platform as a service (PaaS) innovations, such as managed services and serverless computing, has made application development more efficient and economical.
The emergence of containerization and orchestration also provided more precise control over feature management and scaling. Containerization, in particular, guaranteed consistency between runtime and test environments.
Previously, the proliferation of operating systems, libraries, and dependencies created inconsistencies that complicated coordination and led to delayed releases and inefficient testing. Bringing the code and its dependencies inside a single package or container solved this problem.
The containers guarantee code runs consistently because they’re deployed across different environments, and their lightweight, easy maneuverability cuts hosting costs and improves scalability.
Because it automates the provisioning of cloud infrastructure, infrastructure as code (IaC) can solve the problem of environmental drift, where networked resources that comprise the separate deployment environments (development, staging and production) in a cloud application lifecycle can fall out of alignment.
This occurs because manual infrastructure management happens so slowly that its workflows make it difficult for administrators to see the whole application infrastructure. As a result, they might manually update one environment without updating the others, which creates environmental drift. That, in turn, produces costly and time-consuming bugs, system failures, and outages.
By committing infrastructure configuration files to a central version control repository, IaC sharpens visibility into and oversight over manual systems administration. All administration team members can see and edit infrastructure data, which, in turn, gives you robust auditing functionality.
One of the vanguard technologies for enhancing cloud control is edge computing, which makes it possible to process enormous quantities of data with reduced latency (how long it takes for data to travel across a network after it’s requested) and high availability by bringing cloud resources much closer to where data is created and used.
That makes it unnecessary for data to move through centralized data centers in distant sites. Processing and storing data locally also means the data is less exposed to cyber threats since it spends less time in transit, and there is less need to move sensitive data to the cloud.
Serverless architecture can be a double-edged sword, however, when it comes to control. By letting developers run code without having to manage servers, serverless computing reduces infrastructure outlays and integrates workflows. The user doesn’t have to build or maintain the underlying infrastructure because that becomes the cloud provider’s job.
The flip side is that you lose total control of the server — including its hardware, execution environments, and updates — by ceding server management to the cloud vendor. Plus, it can be difficult to verify vendor security. Some vendors run a multitenancy operation, where they run code from several customers on a single server. If those multi-tenant servers are improperly configured, they could expose your code data.
Service meshes eliminate another proliferation headache — too many microservices — by addressing interservice communication challenges. What service meshes do is offer a dedicated infrastructure layer designed to control inter-service communication inside of a microservices-based environment.
They make it much easier to enforce security and compliance by performing tasks such as traffic management, load balancing, and authentication at the network level.
Cloud Control Cost
Cloud control is about more than retaining authority and the active management and implementation of cloud solutions. It’s also about keeping costs in check so that organizations efficiently use resources in the cloud and achieve the most cost-effective operation of their cloud platforms.
This is where cloud cost management strategies enter the picture.
- Right-sizing adjusts the computing resources assigned to a workload — such as memory and storage — so you can match workload requirements to preserve high-level performance and hold down expenses.
- Lower-cost options, such as savings plans, let users lock in a fixed usage level in return for lower pricing than on-demand rates. These plans are a very good fit for workloads with predictable usage patterns.
- Cloud waste audits, done regularly, can eliminate waste by identifying idle or rarely accessed resources, such as unused virtual machines and obsolete snapshots.
- Metadata tagging that links the metadata to its resources gives you more visibility into department, project, or application usage and costs, so you can bill more accurately and see where you could spend money more economically.
- Automating wherever possible, through approaches such as auto-scaling to align resources to demand, cuts costs and consistently applies cost optimizations throughout the cloud environment.
But don’t stop with tactical strategies. Put a strategic framework in place as well to establish more expansive cost management practices and principles. This includes:
- Foundational practices such as a cloud cost center of excellence (CCofE), which is a cost-functional team that lays down best practices, governance and standards for enterprise-wide cloud usage
- Cloud financial management, or FinOps, applies financial and business metrics to cloud computing operations to achieve an optimal balance between speed, expense and performance and encourages cost transparency and accountability
The Impact of Compliance on Cloud Control
Cloud control also has a regulatory component, as can be seen in two of the most comprehensive compliance standards.
The biggest impact that the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have on cloud control involves how they give individuals power over their own data. Specifically, CCPA lets consumers opt out of allowing a business to collect and use their data, while GDPR takes it a step further, requiring businesses to obtain the consent of consumers before they gather and use their data.
Furthermore, CCPA lets individuals access and delete personal data from cloud platforms, while GDPR grants both of those permissions as well as the right to correct inaccurate data.
Transparency is something both rules demand in that they require organizations to reveal how they handle users’ personally identifiable information (PII). Any personal information that is used in isolation or with other data can identify an individual. Businesses must tell users about the following:
- The type of PII they collect
- How and why they’re collecting it
- With whom they share — or to whom they sell — the data
- What legal rights users have over the control of their data
- How they can contact the businesses who would use that data
This significantly shifts more control of data over to users and away from the vendors who store it.
Effective compliance with cloud control requires knowledge, vigilance and management agility. First, you must know what assets you have in the cloud, such as microservices and virtualized resources, so you can protect them.
Then, select compliance programs and frameworks (e.g., the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, HIPAA, System and Organization Controls, or SOC2) that align with industry standards. Monitor your controls continuously to guarantee they’re operational. Automate crucial tasks such as order processing and threat scanning to effectively manage complex cloud environments.
There are a myriad of cloud security challenges that can compromise control:
- Big, complex and distributed environments that grow the attack surface
- Limited ability to visualize and track cloud asset usage
- Constantly changing workloads
- The proliferation of privileges and improperly configured keys, among others
But there are cloud security technologies that provide the basis for a vigorous security strategy, including encryption, identity and access management, cloud firewalls, virtual private clouds, and cloud monitoring.
Note that security and operational flexibility aren’t exclusive to one another. For instance, CloudOps, which applies IT processes to a cloud-based architecture to enhance and expedite business processes, combines the best of both worlds.
Properly managing a CloudOps environment towards these ends involves a multi-step approach that might automate testing against security configurations; adopt secure storage and migration; establish server remediation; and invest in security tools that spot malicious code, scan for vulnerabilities, and detect network intrusions.
Control in Multicloud and Hybrid-Cloud Environments
Multi-cloud management platforms, or CMPs, reliably establish multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud controls by deploying a single platform to manage multiple cloud computing services and providers. A CMP does this in several ways. Among other things, it:
- Furnishes a single pane of glass to monitor and manage resources across varying cloud environments
- Consolidates workforce management and resource provisioning across different cloud services
- Tracks, allots and enhances expenditures for multiple cloud service providers
- Makes it easier to migrate workloads between different platforms
Closely related to a CMP and also integral for multicloud control is a central control plane, which refers to management decision-making within a cloud system that ensures effective network configuration and resource allocation throughout different cloud environments.
Using uniform tooling, which standardizes core application services such as traffic management, can make deploying applications on multiple cloud platforms less complex and less costly. Engaging the same load-balancing solution across multiple clouds can also make costs more predictable and app performance more consistent.
Other worthwhile multi- or hybrid-cloud control strategies include prioritizing migration components according to their vitality and relevance and validating active user accounts, pertinent data, and necessary services.
Multi- and hybrid-cloud strategies that afford a measure of cloud control come at it from different perspectives. A multi-cloud approach works against vendor lock-in by using services from multiple cloud providers – a choice that also gives you more flexibility in cloud data usage by letting you distribute workloads over different platforms.
A hybrid cloud combines public and private cloud resources to balance control (a private cloud strength) with scalability (a public cloud feature). In this instance, a business can stay in control of its sensitive data by storing it on a private, on-premises server while applying the same hybrid cloud platform to multiple operations.
Hiring only a single vendor limits what you can do to meet unique and changing business needs and respond to potential crises. Multiple clouds afford more planning options for disaster recovery and business continuity, and they expand the features palette available to you (e.g., one cloud vendor might have better storage capabilities, while another might have greater computing power).
The Balance Between Control, Agility and Innovation
Striking a balance between the need for cloud control and the benefits of agility and innovation is, effectively, about creating an equilibrium between developer autonomy and platform manageability and security.
Developers must be able to freely create so that their companies can innovate, scale and prosper. However, it’s necessary to have the proper controls in place, along with attendant security guardrails and regulations, to keep sensitive data safe and ensure operational efficiency. Also, understand it’s not enough to balance these factors. They must be aligned so that all of them work in a complementary, harmonious way instead of at cross-purposes.
Business leaders should explore ways to establish a symmetry between autonomy and centralization, where developers can experiment and move faster in a secure cloud environment.
One such way to go is to commit to strong security and guidelines under which developers can pursue operational excellence. This makes developers responsible for the quality of the code they write, where they learn how to create software that is secure and capable of producing innovative value, regardless of the language or framework they employ.
It also requires developers to understand what a secure stack is so that they can make the right decisions when they build applications or the systems around them.
To make the cloud platform manageable — i.e., controllable— choose automation, standardization, and patterns where feasible, rather than attempting to manually control all of your configuration management.
Automation allows you to manage applications and services so that they are scalable and repeatable.
Standardization lets you build reusable processes and services libraries for use throughout the cloud infrastructure. With patterns, you can fashion reusable templates for typical situations, such as multi-tenancy, or use APIs to connect different systems.
Make a Shift in Perspective
Similar to any other change in technology, the cloud requires a shift in perspective and approach. This will involve changes to the IT organization, the relationship between IT and the business, and how IT services are provided: People, processes and technology will all need to transform.
All of this will impact cloud control, but concerns about control in the cloud shouldn’t hold you back from exploring its benefits. After all, the data and applications are still yours, and you will oversee how they are used.
Effective control over the lifecycle of your cloud applications is a dynamic process, just like cloud outsourcing. Establishing control is necessary when you begin cloud operations and as an ongoing activity, where it’s adjusted in anticipation of, and preparation for, evolving business needs, changing market conditions, and more, fewer, or different vendor capabilities.
Our security engagement with Hilldrup turned into a cloud transformation project that lowered costs and freed up employee’s time.
Don’t let cloud complexity hold you back. Our Cloud specialists can help you navigate the cloud landscape and find the perfect fit for your organization. Get started now
