The Latest Trends in Multi-Cloud Data Security and Resilience

That's the question facing nearly every modern organization, no matter their size. Cloud adoption continues to grow rapidly and is expected to exceed $590 billion by the end of 2023, leaving companies to determine the ideal cloud strategy for their business.

Earlier this month, ShardSecure hosted a fireside chat with Ed Amoroso, the CEO and Founder of TAG Cyber, and Abhijeet Kulkarni, the MD Advisory & Google Cloud Leader for KPMG US. Our expert discussion covered the latest trends in multi-cloud data security and resilience, including regulatory changes, issues with consistency, and the rise of new AI technologies. Below, we recap our discussion and explore a solution for robust multi-cloud resilience.

What are the latest trends in multi-cloud data security and resilience?

1. Accelerating cloud adoption

Earlier this year, there were concerns that rising cloud costs would force companies to scale back their digital transformation plans. In actuality, our experts have seen companies accelerate their cloud migrations in order to modernize their stack, improve cost efficiencies, and grow their businesses.

The vast majority of these companies are adopting a multi-cloud architecture — 9.9 out of 10, by Abhijeet Kulkarni’s estimate. Many are doing so because a multi-cloud approach allows them to strategically leverage different clouds (for instance, Google Cloud Platform for data processing and analytics, and AWS or Azure for workload computing). This approach can also help companies ensure lower prices for certain services while avoiding vendor lock-in.

2. Consistency issues in multi-cloud environments

Although multi-cloud environments are bringing many benefits for companies, they also add complexity. With proprietary tools that are different in each cloud environment, a multi-cloud architecture can intensify management burdens.

As a result, organizations have to ensure that their environments can remain consistent across multiple cloud providers. They also need to unite these environments in a single pane of glass and tie them back to their security controls so that each is equally well protected.

3. Growing global privacy regulations

International data privacy laws like the EU’s GDPR and state-level legislation like California’s CCPA and CPRA are growing more complex and more prevalent. The challenge of meeting compliance with the rising number of data privacy laws is already significant, and multi-cloud architectures complicate the issue further.

Interestingly, compliance used to be an even more significant burden in multi-cloud environments, as regulators were initially uncomfortable with these modern architectures. Now, though, compliance teams and regulators have gained confidence in the larger cloud companies. What remains is for organizations to implement strong distributed posture management and flexible data security solutions across their various cloud platforms.

4. Transformations in AI and automation

Until recently, most cyberthreats originated from individual hackers. Today, though, many attack vectors are automated, and AI is dialing up the intensity of attacks. As a result, attacks have become faster and more comprehensive, with potentially catastrophic results for companies.

As Ed Amoroso of TAG Cyber noted, we’ll continue to see advances in the automation of cyberattacks. But we’ll also see major AI advances in data security to counter those attacks.

More broadly, companies can expect to see AI transform job requirements within the data security and analysis sector, since many manual tasks will be automated and remaining positions will require high-level strategic thinking.

Abhijeet Kulkarni added another use case for automation: leveraging AI to help with cloud resource optimization. With the right tools, organizations can make their operations more efficient and even improve their cybersecurity posture.

5. Shifting the burden of insider threats

Since the cloud gained widespread adoption, the burden of protecting against insider threats has shifted. As Ed Amoroso explained, admin screening used to be a major concern for companies that maintained their data on-premises. Now, though, the rise of the cloud has shifted some of the responsibility for vetting administrators from individual CISOs to cloud providers. The largest of these CSPs have abundant resources to carefully screen their prospective employees and mitigate insider threats.

Additionally, new solutions like the ShardSecure platform are allowing companies to protect their data from unauthorized access, including by third-party administrators, in the cloud.

6. The emergence of DSPM and multi-cloud management

Data security posture management, or DSPM, isn’t a brand new field, but it is certainly rising in importance as companies struggle to balance efficiency with security and compliance.

More broadly, management solutions for multi-cloud architectures are steadily growing. The global multi-cloud management market was valued at $8 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow 28% annually from 2023 to 2030.

7. An increased demand for multi-cloud resilience

More and more companies are seeking solutions that can strengthen their data resilience across multiple cloud providers with a single API. Although the heterogeneity of a multi-cloud approach does offer some inherent resilience, organizations are increasingly looking for tools to help them cover the gaps.

The ideal multi-cloud resilience solution will ensure high availability and data integrity without increasing complexity or management burdens. The ShardSecure platform offers one such solution.

ShardSecure: strengthening multi-cloud data security and resilience

ShardSecure helps organizations strengthen their data security and resilience while retaining control of their data in multi-cloud architectures. With high availability, self-healing data, simple integration, and advanced file-level protection, our platform supports companies in maintaining the accuracy, privacy, and availability of their critical cloud data.

The ShardSecure platform provides an abstraction layer that sits between applications and data storage locations. This separates sensitive data from cloud administrators and other third parties, ensuring strong data privacy and confidentiality. It also offers support for data sovereignty and cross-border regulatory compliance, including the GDPR and Schrems II.

We never store or process customer data, and we offer agentless integration for multi-cloud architectures. This means that organizations can deploy the ShardSecure platform to solve data privacy, security, and resilience problems without increasing costs, complexity, or management burdens.

To learn more about our technology, take a look at our resources or view our other fireside chats.