Blog | 7 Reasons Your Business Needs Cloud Governance

7 Reasons Your Business Needs Cloud Governance

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Moving from an on-premise IT system to cloud-based services can be a daunting task. This transformation can result in security challenges and other problems. However, businesses have to embrace this new technology for the benefits that come with it.

Adopting cloud-based IT infrastructure without proper cloud governance in an impromptu manner may lead to more drawbacks than benefits. Cloud grants agility and new speed to innovation like never before by making it easier for teams to deploy assets or provision infrastructures at a press of a button. But these benefits of the cloud come at the cost of new risks that cloud governance can help to diminish. As cloud services can burn a hole in your pocket, it is imperative to set up well-organized cloud governance that considers security and compliance, data management, company assets, configurations, applications performance, budget, operations and much more to enable optimal use of the cloud for an organization in a dependable and secured way. That is why a business must consider cloud governance.

Proper implementation of cloud governance helps in risk management, cost optimization, productivity improvement, and enhanced data security. Read on to understand what cloud governance is and why your business needs it.

What is Cloud Governance?

Cloud governance consists of rules and protocols devised by organizations and businesses to help improve data security and risk management. These rules ensure all operations run smoothly and allow employees to use and deploy new cloud systems more conveniently.

Cloud governance also makes the transformation from on-premise IT infrastructure to cloud flawless by considering all factors. All employees also have seamless access to cloud infrastructure and systems. The approach additionally encourages collaboration where necessary. That’s why it is paramount to include cloud governance in your business.

7 Reasons your Business needs Cloud Governance

You may need extra time to design and implement the best cloud governance. But if you put in the required efforts, you can get many benefits. These are the reasons why your business needs cloud governance. Let’s explore just a few of them.

1. Cloud Governance Helps Regulate Accessibility

IT cloud infrastructure is remotely accessible to all employees in an organization. Uncontrolled access to data can cause data integrity and security issues. Security can be a concern for cloud-based IT systems without rules and protocols. That is why cloud governance is a necessity to restrict accessibility.

Cloud governance allows employees to only access the section of the system they are permitted to, which also applies to cloud applications. That way, dishonest and rogue applications can never interfere with sensitive architecture. Cloud governance makes it possible to decide who has access to what and how the data acquired is used.

Additionally, you can regulate data and monitor activities in real-time. So, any data breach is timely reported to the system administrator, and necessary actions are taken on time.

2. Enhances System Security

Data security is another concern when migrating to the cloud. It can increase some risks to the system and operations, such as data storage, system maintenance, and others. Cloud governance is here to help minimize these risks and make the cloud system more secure.

Putting protocols in place ensures proper data management in the cloud. Data integrity and confidentiality can be maintained with well-laid out rules. It also enhances visibility and control over who accesses what information and outlines how that information is used.

3. Slashes Operational Costs

You no longer have to hire IT specialists to track accounts, check compliance, and analyze operational costs the traditional way. Cloud computing has made it possible to automate everything, including controlled access and policies.

You can reduce operational costs by preventing non-compliant activities with proper cloud governance. Additionally, you can keep shadow IT in check, eliminate unnecessary expenses in infrastructure. It is the best way to keep any project under budget and only carry out the ones vital for the operation of your business. Setting the right cloud governance enables organizations to a kind of creating automated guardrails that will take care of all cloud aspects from budgets to policies management. You get automated responses for any cloud activity that happens, this lessens the load of pulling analytics for each and every cloud action, which in turn adds to your company’s cost saving by reducing the need of workforce.

4. Reduces Compliance Risks

Security compliance audits and assessments have become mandatory for all businesses. Your business operations and security system can be out of order if you don't have cloud governance. Moreover, not many organizations are unaware even data and security compliance exist.

Cloud governance helps businesses to make a long list of security compliances. That will ensure you always comply and avoid hefty fines that regulators impose on noncompliance. It will also help you audit your data policies and usage from time to time. Your employees will always know how to access and use data collected from your clients.

5. Easier Resource Management with Cloud Governance

The main reason for using cloud governance for your business is to better manage the cloud resources. It helps to seamlessly offer accurate control without breaching any security protocols.

With proper cloud governance, your business or organization can manage accounts and grant access to users accordingly. This approach enhances data security and helps to organize and maintain cloud resource allocations. You can group them into departments, projects, cost centres, and other categories relevant to your business.

Proper cloud resource management aids in better cost tracking and addresses most security concerns. There is also controlled access to those cloud resources.

6. Promotes Teamwork

Cloud governance avails resources to team members, making them feel motivated to handle the tasks. Besides, most of these processes are automated. So, employees will have more time to do what they like doing the most. The result is improved productivity in the team and organization overall.

7. Diminishes Shadow IT

Shadow IT systems involve any IT resources not defined within the IT departments. It becomes difficult to track them and determine their costs because they are often not captured in the reports. Shadow IT can happen to any business or organization regardless of its structure.

If your employees cannot access the cloud resources or don’t know how to find them, the chances and risks of shadow IT become high. That can increase security risks and inflate management costs. Cloud governance offers the best approach to prevent that from occurring. It details protocols to be followed to request and access resources without compromising other system operations.

Conclusion

Cloud governance is helpful to businesses of all sizes. It can curb shadow IT, reduce risks, enhance data security, improve cloud resource management, and provide access control. You should consider implementing cloud governance if you don’t have it yet.

However, you must understand you will never find a universal solution for cloud governance. The implementation process and management depend on your organization’s needs and structure. Also, you need to continually adjust your cloud governance to ensure policies and new rules are updated.

Till date, we have helped many organizations in creating a comprehensive cloud governance mechanism and achieve improved data security, secured data accessibility, better resource management and more cost savings. If you have cloud governance on mind, talk to Minfy’s cloud experts.

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Blog | Cloud Computing & Education: 7 ways Cloud is Overhauling Ed-Tech

Cloud Computing & Education: 7 ways Cloud is Overhauling Ed-Tech

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Cloud computing is widely adopted in education and other sectors, and the reasons are apparent. In Covid times when education shifted from physical classrooms to online classes, educational organizations such as schools, colleges, and universities got a chance to leverage cloud computing and its benefits. The cloud-enabled learning and coaching centres to connect the students and teachers virtually, save spending on textbooks, eliminating the need to buy or own servers and data centres, and many other capabilities which were not possible with the traditional approach. Moreover, they need not to worry about their study materials, documents safety, or files security as they are safe on cloud. With cloud technology students, teachers, and other working staff don’t have to confine themselves to the physical classrooms for lessons. Teaching and learning is happening remotely, and services are accessible through any internet-connected device.

Cloud computing is revolutionizing the education sector in many ways. Let’s take a look at how this new technology is proving to be the game-changer in the education system by changing the traditional ways of teaching and learning.

7 Ways Cloud Computing is Changing Education

1. Universal accessibility through virtual classrooms

Distance learning has been there for many years but was never realized until recently when some education institutions migrated to the cloud. However, most education systems still rely on brick-and-mortar classrooms to offer lessons and lectures to students.

Cloud computing makes it possible to host virtual classrooms. Also, sharing learning resources securely and remotely is possible through this technology. A student in one continent can now interactively attend a lecture hosted on another. Students can also interact and access course materials on their mobile devices.

Due to cloud computing, a student can enrol in any school and attain academic certifications without going to a physical classroom. This is also beneficial to people who are held up with other commitments and can’t attend schools and colleges to complete their education. You can now work and pursue your studies from your office desk or home, provided you are connected to the internet.

2. Cost saving on students' data storage and maintenance

Educational institutions are increasingly experiencing challenges with data storage and management systems. The number of students enrolling at every level is increasing, and managing their personal information requires resources. You are supposed to invest in expensive computing hardware and software to run such big educational institutions.

With cloud computing, you no longer need expensive hardware and software. All the information about every registered student is accessible over the internet. This virtual hosting with a pay-as-you-go plan is way much more affordable. Besides, there are many cloud computing service providers to choose from.

3. Cloud brings scalability to educational institutes

Upscaling hardware and software is a big challenge in the education sector. It involves buying expensive hardware and management software to handle the increasing number of enrolling students and traffic hikes. Also, institutions set up classrooms, libraries, hostels, etc.

Besides, these established resources are underutilized when scaling down. An effective cloud-native solution that offers scalability in times of heavy traffic can help solve this problem. A renowned school was facing a similar kind of problem, Minfy designed a cloud-based highly scalable solution to handle the heavy traffic demands during admission times and purge the downtime and expenses involved.

The flexibility of cloud computing makes it the revolutionary solution for education field that learning institutions need. It allows scaling down or up with little or no effect on human resources, IT infrastructure, and physical structures. As mentioned, you only pay the cloud service providers for what you use at that time. That means there will be no underutilization when you scale down during a low activity period. You also don’t have to experience overload during peak usage or due to high traffic experienced during assignment submissions and training registrations.

4. Enhanced data security through virtual applications

Educational institutions are adversely affected by data breaches due to cyber attacks. This problem is even more rampant when you host your servers and computing system locally. Many institutions report data breaches when they experience such attacks. Locally-hosted systems can also be affected by a power outage or server-related problems. Such unpredictable factors can adversely affect learning.

Cloud computing makes education systems more stable. Institutions can offer uninterrupted distance learning services through the cloud and maintain data integrity by using virtual applications such as virtual private network (VPN). The Government of Manipur’s Department of IT were facing security issues with their on-premise data storage, we helped them migrate their mission-critical workloads to AWS Cloud to optimize costs and achieve scalable compute and storage in the cloud using Amazon EC2 and Amazon VPC.

VPN protocols such as IKEv2 automatically encrypt the outgoing data. No one can intercept or alter the information in transit, which means students or the intended target get uncompromised data. Besides, students can also protect their login credentials and other personal information when they use cloud applications.

5. Wide reach to diverse learners through cloud

Diversity is another factor that educational institutions should consider seriously. Many students are locked out because they cannot afford to attend the brick-and-mortar classrooms. That can be due to finances or fear of stigmatization. For example, some adults who unfortunately dropped out of school fear enrolling again to attain their academic mileage for fear of sharing a classroom with children. Besides, they may be committed to responsibilities.

The good news is that cloud computing makes educational institutions take their learning services to potential learners. The distance barrier no longer exists for those already using cloud services. Regardless of age and distance, learners can enroll and attend classes online without the fear of stigmatization or discrimination.

6. Up-to-date learning syllabus available in the cloud

Students may use outdated learning materials because the budget for buying new textbooks is beyond their reach. Technological advancement and redrawing of administrative boundaries make most learning materials obsolete in just a few years. Learning materials published about 5 years ago may have one or more concepts they present inaccurate.

It is less expensive and easy to update the learning materials in real-time when you move to the cloud. That means students always have access to the up-to-date information.

7. Cloud made education affordable

Every student who joins any educational institution receives a long list of textbooks and other learning materials to buy. These are expensive and push parents or guidance to the edge. Some cannot even afford them. Besides, the boarding and tuition fees are usually high because of the complex logistics involved in offering learning services physically.

With cloud computing, learning resources are uploaded to the cloud and accessible to all registered students cost-free. eBooks and e-textbooks can be accessed remotely on almost every internet-connected device. That reduces the learning cost in various institutions that migrate to the cloud.

Why you need Cloud in Education?

Cloud computing is changing education in many ways. It benefits institutions and students, which makes it a powerful tool to advance learning. Adopting cloud computing ensures universal accessibility of learning services, which also reach more diverse students. It is a reliable technology for digital transformation that learning institutions need to cost-effectively and efficiently offer their training programs.

Cloud computing made it possible to cut down the yearly expenses of buying and commissioning IT infrastructure. Now, all learning resources are in the cloud such as virtual classrooms, software, and textbooks, and, are accessible to every student connected to the internet. Distance learning is now possible and available to learners worldwide. Its flexibility and scalability has made it the present and the next big thing.  Schools, colleges, universities, and other learning institutions are embracing cloud for the technology benefits if offers and learners worldwide embrace it for its convenience. Nothing appeals to them as the access to all the learning materials at their fingertips and achieving the academic milestone remotely. Learning institutions that already use cloud computing services are more immune to future changes, and their success is almost guaranteed.

The verdict

The cloud technology is still a new subject for many educational institutes that had to rush to using it due to the need of hour in pandemic. Considering this as an opportunity to learn more about cloud computing will only help the education fields to get the maximum benefits of cloud and flourish significantly in future. Having an expert by your side to easy understand how cloud can help your school, college or university grow more is always an add-on.

Till date, we have helped many educational organizations, coaching and teaching institutes to adopt cloud and supported them in understanding why they need cloud in today’s digital world. To know how we can help you, talk to Minfy’s cloud experts.

Book 1-hour free consultation with pricing details

Blog | CIOs and CTOs: Know these Cloud Computing Security Basics, Challenges and Best Practices

CIOs and CTOs: Know these Cloud Computing Security Basics, Challenges and Best Practices

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About 83% of the firms confirm data security in cloud computing environments as the top concern, according to Statista's analysis of enterprise’s cloud computing difficulties from 2019 to 2022. The biggest obstacles in cloud security settings, in their opinion, are controlling expenses, governance, and a lack of personnel or knowledge.

Today, cyber security is a prime concern for businesses. It is of utmost importance to invest in cyber security as your business data is exposed to threats in many ways. But, it gets economical challenging for many organizations to hire a security expert or a chief information security officer (CISO) exclusively for cyber security. In most of the businesses, the CIOs and CTOs are at the frontline to streamline the business operations and solving the rising business challenges. Even CIOs and CTOs seem to overlook the role of cyber security businesses as they may not be knowledgeable of this requirement for smooth business operations or fully aware of the side effects of ignoring it.

Today's CTOs and CIOs have far more responsibilities than they did in the past, their duties and responsibilities are getting more challenging and tougher than ever as more businesses across the world are adopting cloud computing and cloud-based technologies. That’s why it is mandatory for CIOs and CTOs to understand the importance of cloud security, its basics, challenges and best practices, to attain better reliability in business with measurable results.

What is Cloud Security?

Cloud Security is the security mechanisms (policies, technologies, tools, services and controls) that protect the infrastructure, apps, and data housed in the cloud from violations. Data and resource access management, privacy protection, and user and device authentication are all ensured by these security procedures. Cloud security is more about utilizing a cloud safely.

Additionally, cloud security enables firms to be ready for future limitations, which demand compliance with international legal requirements like the GDPR. For instance, businesses must ensure that the cloud is designed with the right architecture in-line with the recommended security/privacy policies, failing to do so may lead to data breaches and significant losses.

Cloud security is a critical aspect that focuses on safeguarding data and corporate material such as client orders, top-secret design blueprints, and financial records. Maintaining your clients' trust and securing the resources that support your competitive edge depend on your ability to prevent leaks and data theft. Cloud security must be of top priority for any business moving to the cloud as it protects your company's data and assets.

Cloud Security Basics every CIO and CTO must know

1. Cyber security insurance is not sufficient

Businesses are learning to understand that cyber security insurance alone won't protect them against all kinds of threats. Attacks by ransom ware are happening more often, and demand is growing. What's more, a "double ransom"—a further payment requested for not disclosing the stolen data—is frequently added to the "single" ransom required to encrypt data. Even worse, they might add a "triple ransom" that specifically targets the people whose data was taken.

2. Selecting a cloud provider as per business needs

You must pick a cloud services provider with the greatest security measures and tools to support your business needs. The most chosen cloud service providers are Amazon Web Services. However, there are other additional cloud service providers, such as IBM and Oracle.

3. Cloud may not be a complete security solution

Modern cloud migration methods relieve on-premise systems of some of their workload, but this cannot assure a complete security solution. In reality, there are several instances in real-time where alone cloud solutions were not found meeting the purpose of data security fully. As a result, the decision to move mission-critical data to the cloud is never settled. Many businesses do this by keeping their mission-critical data in their data centers.

4. Basic services are insufficient

Basic cloud services only offer minimal protection that falls well short of what businesses need. Because they represent additional income streams and because clients want reliable solutions, cloud suppliers provide value-added security services.

6 Cloud Security Challenges before CIOs and CTOs in 2022

The lack of distinct perimeters in the public cloud creates a fundamentally different security reality. Adopting contemporary cloud strategies such as automated Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) techniques, distributed server less architectures, and transient assets like functions-as-a-service and containers makes this even more difficult. The various layers of risk and sophisticated cloud-native security concerns that today's cloud-oriented enterprises CTOs and CIOs are dealing with include:

1. Expanded area for data hijack

Hackers now use the public cloud environment as a sizable and very appealing attack surface by taking the advantage of unsecured cloud ingress ports to gain access and disrupt workloads and data in the cloud. Numerous hostile threats, including malware, zero-day vulnerabilities, account takeovers, and others, are now widespread.

2. Automation and Devops, DevSecOps

Businesses that have adopted the highly automated Devops CI/CD culture must make sure that the right security measures are followed and included in code and templates early in the development cycle. Following the deployment of a workload in production, security-related modifications might compromise the organization’s security posture and increase time to the market.

3. Environmental complexities

In today's hybrid and multi-cloud environments, which are the environments of choice for businesses, managing security requires techniques and tools that operate without issues across the private cloud providers, public cloud providers, and on-premise deployments—including branch office edge protection for geographically dispersed organizations.

4. External data sharing

Numerous clients, vendors, and other stakeholders frequently want data to be provided. You must establish security procedures to make sure that data packets are not intercepted and utilized inappropriately as the data is exposed to a largely external conduit.

5. Dearth of control and visibility to cloud

The infrastructure layer is completely under the control of the cloud providers and is not made available to the users under the IaaS model. In the PaaS and SaaS cloud models, the absence of visibility and control is even more pronounced. Customers of cloud services frequently struggle to accurately identify measure and visualize their cloud assets and environments.

6. Poor interfaces

Hackers and online attackers may get access to your infrastructure through weak or insecure interfaces, such as APIs that permit connections from the third-party apps. Outsiders can take advantage of these paths to steal data, change it, and launch a denial-of-service attack.

6 Best Practices to Establish Powerful Cloud Security

In spite of the fact that cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer a number of cloud-native security features and services, supplemental third-party solutions are necessary to achieve enterprise-grade cloud workload protection from security breaches, data leaks, and targeted attacks in the cloud environment. The following best practices can help build a powerful cloud security mechanism.

1. Setting additional data protection

Improved data security can be achieved with encryption at all transport layers, safe file sharing and communications, ongoing risk management for compliance, and upkeep of excellent data storage resource hygiene, such as spotting mis-configured buckets and deleting orphan resources.

2. Controlling IAM and authentication across complicated infrastructures

To make updating IAM definitions easier when business needs change, work with groups and roles rather than individuals. Allow just the assets and APIs that are required for a group or role to carry out its obligations. The higher the degrees of authentication, the greater are the scope of privileges. Also, don't forget about proper IAM hygiene, such as implementing strong password standards and authorization time-outs.

3. Applying virtual server security regulations

Strong Cloud Security Posture Management is offered by cloud security companies, which consistently apply governance and compliance standards and templates when creating virtual servers, audit for configuration deviations, and, wherever needed, takes automated corrective action to fix the issues.

4. Zero-trust network security for the cloud

Business-critical resources and apps should be deployed in logically separated areas of the cloud network of the provider, such as virtual private clouds, AWS. Utilise subnets to micro-segment workloads from one another, and use subnet gateways to enforce granular security controls. Use dedicated WAN lines in hybrid architectures, and alter access to virtual devices, virtual networks, and their gateways, as well as public IP addresses, with static user-defined routing settings.

5. Threat intelligence

By intelligently comparing aggregated log data with internal data from asset and configuration management systems, vulnerability scanners, external data from public threat intelligence feeds, location, databases; a third-party cloud security vendors add context to the numerous and varied streams of cloud-native logs. Additionally, AI-based anomaly detection techniques help to identify unknown threats. These threats are then subjected to forensics investigation to assess their risk profile. Time to remediation is shortened by real-time notifications on intrusions and policy breaches; in certain cases, these alerts even start auto-remediation operations.

6. Application security

The WAF rules are automatically updated in response to changes in traffic behavior, and it is installed closer to the micro-services that are carrying out workloads. This will granularly examine and manage traffic to and from web application servers.

Conclusion

Modern cloud tools and technology have helped organizations become more sophisticated and data-driven than before. Every second and piece of data is critical in the corporate world of today in order to make wise choices and outperform rivals. As a market leader in cloud services, we assist companies in choosing the best strategy, operating model, and road map by fusing our extensive business and industry knowledge with current insights.

Do you have cloud security concerns? Contact us today and learn more about how we can help your company.

Book 1-hour free consultation with pricing details

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