Nowadays, with the evolution of technology, many companies are starting their journey as a cloud native company. They don’t work in traditional infrastructure environments. Cloud computing has become more accessible, for any people inside of company, since the cloud architecture until marketing team, remote workers, after the covid-19 pandemic, many organizations have been increasing their access in the cloud.

This migration, or “adaptation”, brings a series of challenges, according to the Gartner Peers Community, these are the responses to a question about cloud adoption:

 

“What, according to you, is the most common challenge faced with cloud adoption?”

source:https://www.gartner.com/peer-community/poll/according-to-most-common-challenge-faced-cloud-adoption

As we can see, almost 30% didn’t have enough personnel with “Cloud Expertise”, almost 30% had a sheer sprawl of data in the existing environment, 18% had no visibility into the content and 13% are challenged by migrating data to the cloud, that is, almost 80% of the challenges involved management of dates and not enough people with expertise in the cloud. All of this information brings us to another important challenge.

A cloud strategy is a concise viewpoint on the role of cloud computing in the organization. However, business and IT leaders continue to make 10 common mistakes when crafting their cloud strategy, according to Gartner, Inc.

Gartner analysts are discussing how to enable and exploit cloud, and demonstrate value at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2022. Business and IT leaders should collaboratively build a cloud strategy and avoid the following 10 mistakes when building their cloud strategy. Let's talk about all of them.

 

1. Assuming It’s an IT (Only) Strategy

Cloud computing isn’t only about technology. Those outside IT have skills and knowledge critical to cloud strategy success. “Business and IT leaders should avoid the mistake of devising an IT-centric strategy and then trying to “sell it” to the rest of the business,” said Meinardi. “Business and IT should be equal partners in the definition of the cloud strategy.”

2. Not Having an Exit Strategy

Devising an exit strategy from cloud providers is difficult, which is one of the reasons why many leaders don’t create one. Many organizations believe they don’t need an exit strategy because they don’t expect to bring anything back from the cloud. However, an exit strategy is vital to the success of an organization’s cloud strategy. “It’s like having an insurance policy in your drawer, that you hopefully will never need to use,” said Meinardi.

3. Combining or Confusing a Cloud Strategy with a Cloud Implementation Plan

A cloud strategy is different from a cloud implementation plan and a cloud strategy must come first. It is the decision phase in which business and IT leaders decide the role that cloud computing will play in the organization. A cloud implementation plan comes next, putting the cloud strategy into effect.

4. Believing It’s Too Late to Devise a Cloud Strategy

It is never too late to begin a cloud strategy. “If organizations drive cloud adoption without a strategy this will ultimately cause resistance from individuals who are not aligned on the strategy’s key drivers and principles,” said Meinardi. “As a result, this resistance will slow down cloud adoption and potentially jeopardize the entire cloud project.”

5. Equating a Cloud Strategy with “We’re Moving Everything to the Cloud”

Many organizations assume that having a cloud strategy implies moving everything to the cloud. “This approach deters many business and IT leaders from devising a strategy because they think it means they’ll be forced to start using cloud computing for everything,” said Meinardi. “Organizations should keep an open mind and partner with a non-cloud technology expert, such as an enterprise architect, who can bring a broad viewpoint in the definition of your cloud strategy.”

6. Saying “Our Cloud Strategy Is Our Data Center Strategy”

Many organizations confuse their cloud strategy with their data center strategy. While organizations need to keep them separate, they need to ensure they align with each other because that affects the role that cloud computing will play in their organization. “Cloud strategy decisions are workload by workload, not data center decisions,” said Meinardi.

7. Believing That an Executive Mandate Is a Strategy

Another common mistake that organizations make is to adopt cloud computing because the CEO, CIO or the head of a business unit believes that doing so will result in cost savings. Gartner analysts recommend treating executive mandates as sponsorship to devise a cloud strategy and not as a cloud strategy in and of itself. The cloud strategy should also keep the connection to the business, ensuring that organizations know why workloads are moving and what the goal is.

8. Believing That Being a <Fill in Vendor> Shop Means That Is the Cloud Strategy

Organizations will likely use several different cloud services over time. As the use of cloud services could become increasingly broad and diverse, business and IT leaders should devise a broad strategy by accommodating multiple types of scenarios, cloud services, vendors and non-cloud environments.

9. Outsourcing Development of Your Cloud Strategy

Outsourcing an organization’s cloud strategy may sound attractive, but should not be done – it is far too important to outsource. Instead, Gartner analysts recommend that business and IT leaders use third parties — even the cloud provider — for implementation. This can be a cost-effective way of procuring the scarce cloud skills their organization needs.

10. Saying “Our Strategy Is Cloud First” Is the Entire Cloud Strategy

A cloud-first approach means that if someone asks for an investment, the default place for them to build or place the new asset is in the public cloud. “But cloud-first doesn’t mean cloud only. If business and IT leaders adopt a cloud-first principle, their strategy should work out the exceptions to the default choice that will make applications and elsewhere other than in the cloud,” said Meinardi.

 

The big issue is that the larger the company, the more people will have access to cloud-based environments. Moreover, many permissions are granted to applications and machines that connect to other applications and databases to exchange information.

Thus, it is necessary to have a strategy that limits unnecessary access and prevents inadequate sharing of information, which can be achieved through CIEM.

 

What is CIEM?

The purpose of Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM) is to manage access in cloud and multi-cloud environments.

This is possible through the principle of Least Privilege, which contributes to companies that need to avoid risks such as attacks by malicious users and data breaches, problems generated by excessive permissions on this type of infrastructure.

Thus, a CIEM solution allows you to remove these excessive entitlements and centralize the visibility and control of permissions in a cloud environment.

Through the use of artificial intelligence, a CIEM solution is also able to analyze exposure levels of a company’s cloud environments, enabling the identification and reduction of cybersecurity risks.

 

How can we help you?

Has your company migrated its infrastructure to the cloud? Do you work in a multi-cloud environment? Does your security team have full visibility of identities and entitlements on Cloud Service Providers (CSPs)?

Managing cloud entitlements has become a challenge for cybersecurity teams. This happens especially because of the increased number and complexity in multi cloud environments. In these environments, services and policies can be misconfigured and poorly defined.

According to Gartner, by 2024, organizations running cloud infrastructure services will suffer a minimum of 2,300 violations of least privilege policies, per account, every year.

senhasegura Cloud Entitlements help enterprises manage cloud access risks via administration-time controls for the governance of entitlements in hybrid and multi cloud IaaS.

 

Do you know what "Build With Us" is?

We are inviting you to have first-hand access to our new cloud security platform and participate in our beta users program. If you are an Information Security professional with experience in IAM and wish to participate in the construction of an innovative project, come build with us.

What do I gain as a senhasegura beta user?

• Free access to senhasegura Cloud Security - Cloud Entitlements for one year, with no limit on the number of identities to manage.
• Opportunity to participate in online feedback with our team of Built-With-Us supporters to share their impressions and suggestions.
• Rich exchange of experiences with professionals in the IAM market about the challenges of managing identities in multi-cloud environments.
• Opportunity to permanently occupy a chair in our Innovation Committee, where we discuss problems and build solutions for the most diverse challenges in the security area - limited spaces!

What will be your mission as a senhasegura beta user?

• Co-creation: Giving feedback and proposing improvements that would make your day-to-day work easier.
• Confidence: Report bugs and experience problems found while using the product to gain maturity and quality of the solution.
• Practice: Carrying out specific tasks and procedures within the product to support us in building a specialist market solution.
• Innovation: Get first-hand pre-release updates to try before the stable release goes live.

Source: demo console.

If you would like to be part of that, come to us and build with us.

 

References:

• https://senhasegura.com/why-are-ciem-solutions-important/
• https://senhasegura.com/build-with-us-senhasegura/
• https://www.gartner.com/en/conferences/emea/infrastructure-operations-cloud-uk
• https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-11-21-gartner-highlights-ten-common-cloud-strategy-mistakes
• https://www.gartner.com/peer-community/poll/according-to-most-common-challenge-faced-cloud-adoption
• https://senhasegura.com/cloud-infrastructure-entitlements-management/