Keeping Your Clouds in Order: The Importance of Cost and Security Governance

By Galaxia Martin, Solutions Director

Cybersecurity is on more minds than ever before, with good reason. Every day, organizations across the globe are targeted by so-called ‘pre-attacks,’ in which hackers strike primarily to gather information about vulnerabilities they could exploit in the future.

Discussions about cloud security usually focus on governance and compliance, which can be incredibly tricky for multicloud environments, with complexities comparable to those shadow IT once presented. Addressing your cloud provider’s recommendations is a good start, but it’s not enough to keep your organization safe. Although many cloud providers offer cloud-native tools to help with compliance and governance, gaps may still exist beyond their purview. To address such gaps, every organization should establish a centralized, third-party governance solution, aka center of excellence.

Fortunately, there are solutions out there, like SDI’s Cost and Security Analysis, that dig deeper and look harder. Effective governance solutions augment provider protections and facilitate a level of insight into a multicloud/hybrid environment comparable to the one habitually gleaned from monitoring your own in-house/on-premises environment.

Solution cost is always a factor, so in addition to security, it’s important to think about fiscal impact. Historically, the maintenance costs for on-premises solutions were mostly limited to hardware and management, but as hybrid approaches become more and more common, it’s no longer that simple. There are also new ways to boost ROI, avoid common errors, and reduce costs in the cloud.

Many providers offer purchase plans to help reduce total cost by offering discounts over the long term, properly sizing the workloads, and using governance and automation intelligently to stay on budget. By leveraging cloud-costing tools outside of the provider-offered, cloud-native dashboards, you can provide more governance and control over how the cloud is used.

SDI offers a Cost and Security Analysis Pilot to demonstrate the peace of mind you’ll enjoy when we protect your cloud environment. We have already worked with several customers to help identify and address vulnerabilities in their cloud environments.

In one case, SDI resolved all the security issues presented in the customer’s cloud environment through the cloud provider tools. Then, when we implemented our Cloud Security Analysis solution, it identified about 50 gaps that provider tools had overlooked.

SDI also helped a major Midwest city expose additional misconfigurations and establish compliance baselines. SDI resolved all issues in their Azure and AWS security centers. Our cost analysis also identified opportunities for savings of $1,800 per month and recommended additional process improvements to reduce pricing and improve cost automations.

CONTACT US to learn more about what SDI governance solutions can do for you.