With the rapid pace of cloud adoption, organizations are rapidly revolutionizing business processes, but they are struggling to ensure that systems are built, operated, and deployed efficiently with proper cyber hygiene in mind. Business growth experts say that moving fast and breaking things is possible, but failing to implement proper cybersecurity controls simply doesn’t work because the regulatory and threat landscapes are evolving faster than ever before.
Even before organizations embarked on massive digital transformation projects, most were lagging behind in meeting regulatory compliance requirements because they relied on manual processes and tools, such as Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. Cloud adoption has exacerbated these problems, leaving chief information security officers (CISOs) to manage large fleets of applications spread across multiple environments and networks. Managing compliance in these complex and changing environments is a near-impossible task using traditional tools, and things will only get worse in the years to come.
Challenges of Rapid Cloud Adoption
The rapid shift to cloud services has created a wide range of challenges, from increased complexity to IT-agnostic governance to increasingly ephemeral environments. These serverless systems automatically scale up and down based on load, making it difficult to maintain consistent asset inventories. Tracking and monitoring resources and collecting evidence to demonstrate compliance can be difficult in these environments unless continuous monitoring is in place.
Additionally, most organizations operate in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, adding to the complexity of ever-changing cloud environments. Traditional governance, risk, and compliance tools have not evolved at the same pace, resulting in outdated and incomplete reports that are not worth the paper they are printed on. Instead, CISOs must adopt solutions that continuously monitor security, identity, and access management across public and private environments.
Cloud Native Compatibility
Many of the regulations in place today were created for a more stable infrastructure, and therefore easier to document and fortify. However, the regulations themselves continue to evolve to keep pace with cloud adoption, including GDPR and CCPA protections for cloud data privacy, data sovereignty, residency, transit, and cybersecurity frameworks. These new and updated regulations make it essential for organizations to be able to effectively manage compliance requirements in the cloud. Continuous Control Monitoring (CCM) is an emerging technology-based solution that can automate risk assessments and compliance workflows. This approach is essential for ensuring security and regulatory compliance as it strengthens security protocols and ensures compliance within cloud operations.
Some of the key benefits of CCM as a cloud-native GRC solution include:
Unifies disparate tools, controls, and evidence across environments. By bringing together these diverse data sources, CCM tools can analyze and evaluate risk and control data from multiple platforms. Increases accuracy, allowing security analysts to make decisions quickly based on real-time and near-real-time data and analytics. Enables the use of compliance as a notation, including the Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL) published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), driving compliance and risk processes toward a modern DevSecOps approach.
Compliance as a Code also facilitates the machine-to-machine verification process, providing the technology needed to manage compliance. Together, these tools enable organizations to replace manual processes and add real-time visibility into their compliance and security actions.
Artificial Intelligence and Compliance
Based on the news, it seems like every organization is adding AI capabilities to their solutions. As AI adoption increases, threat actors will continue to leverage it to execute more sophisticated attacks. At the same time, more regulations will emerge to govern the use of AI. AI also enables organizations to create and deploy code faster than ever before, increasing the need to radically improve compliance capabilities for cloud and hybrid environments. These changes place an additional burden on internal teams to stop emerging threats, keep up with new regulations, and manage the volume of applications and services deployed in cloud environments.
AI can help compliance and security teams by handling many of the more complex compliance tasks, such as writing policy documents and drafting control implementation statements, as well as enabling predictive analytics and gap detection. However, it remains clear that AI introduces new attack vectors, both from malicious actors directly and from employees who inadvertently expose sensitive data or intellectual property. This balance is impossible without compliance tools designed to leverage the capabilities of cloud computing and AI in a secure and controlled manner.
Achieving compliance today and tomorrow in the cloud
Cloud environments are complex, and it can be extremely difficult to quickly detect and identify risks, leading to significant regulatory compliance issues. To overcome these challenges, organizations must adopt tools that enable compliance as code, use OSCAL to easily express control-based information, and monitor continuous controls to enable automated monitoring and evaluation of system controls. Cloud-native tools offer the best option for organizations looking to optimize GRC initiatives and prepare for upcoming changes. CCM enhances security protocols and embeds compliance within cloud and development operations, simplifying the protection of digital assets in a rapidly evolving landscape.
