For many organizations moving to the cloud, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) like AWS EC2, Azure Virtual Machines or Google Compute Engine often forms the backbone of their cloud architecture. These services allow you to create instances of pretty much any operating system almost instantly. Unfortunately, moving your IT infrastructure to the cloud doesn’t relieve you of your compliance or security obligations.

Virtually every organization is a victim of cybercrime today. As the threat landscape evolves and proliferates, it’s necessary to prioritize the protection of data, customers’ privacy and brand reputation. Security directors must be prepared and equipped with the necessary tools to detect security events and address them accordingly at all times.

Digital technologies have been transforming our world for the past few decades. For instance, the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing have induced an evolution in the way we as society live our everyday lives as well as how many enterprises conduct business. This evolution has started to enter the industrial realm, most notably the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0 and how these forces have driven other innovative ideas such as smart factories.

In July 2019, Capital One made news headlines not for achieving another milestone but because it had been breached. Capital One was using AWS cloud services, as many businesses are doing nowadays. The problem stemmed (in part) because Capital One had a misconfigured open-source Web Application Firewall (WAF) hosted in the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Headlines continue to suggest that organizations’ cloud environments make for tantalizing targets for digital attackers. Illustrating this point, the 2019 SANS State of Cloud Security survey found “a significant increase in unauthorized access by outsiders into cloud environments or to cloud assets” between 2017 (12 percent) and 2018 (19 percent). These findings beg the question: how prepared are organizations to defend themselves against cloud-based threats?

Cloud computing has transformed the IT industry, as services can now be deployed in a fraction of the time that it used to take. Scalable computing solutions have spawned large cloud computing companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

As multi-cloud architectures grow in popularity, more and more organizations will start asking how to secure multi-cloud environments. Some will conclude that a multi-cloud architecture requires a fundamentally different approach to cloud security. That’s one example of a myth about cloud security in a multi-cloud architecture. Let’s take a look at why this assumption is flawed, along with some other common myths about multi-cloud security.

About a decade ago, organizations were hesitant to adopt cloud solutions, with many citing security concerns. Fast forward to 2019, and 81% of organizations have a multi-cloud strategy, spurred on by the desire for increased flexibility, usage-based spending and desire to respond to market opportunity with greater agility.

As someone who has worked for their entire career in the Managed Network Services space, if I had to pick out, over the past five years, two of the most impactful shifts in managing technology, it would be a shift from traditional, in-house servers to solutions where 3rd parties build “clouds” to provide similar business functions as well as the increased pressure on organizations to have comprehensive cyber-security strategies as threats become more significant.