Cloud computing empowers organizations with the capability to scale their services and operations digitally. Utilizing cloud-hosted software and infrastructure allows you to take advantage of better accessibility, flexible integrations, and extensive services to achieve growth and sustainability. However, like all systems, cloud technologies are accompanied by risks and vulnerabilities that organizations need to manage to ensure data privacy, security, and operational resilience.
To guide the use of cloud computing resources, cloud compliance is a discipline that enables organizations to maximize cloud services while maintaining the security of their data and operations. Let’s dive into what cloud compliance is and why it’s important, the regulatory standards and frameworks for cloud compliance, and the strategies and steps that organizations can take to achieve cloud compliance, including 6clicks’ continuous control monitoring solution.
In essence, cloud compliance refers to adherence to regulatory standards as well as local and international laws governing the use of cloud computing resources. These resources come in the form of infrastructure, software, servers, databases, and other services that are delivered over the internet by cloud platforms or service providers such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
The process of cloud compliance involves establishing practices, policies, and procedures for preventing or mitigating risks associated with cloud usage. This includes assessing the compliance of your cloud service provider to standards and regulations, identifying your organization’s assets and data and their risk level, and implementing measures or controls to maintain the security and reliability of cloud services used by your organization.
An increasing number of organizations are adopting cloud solutions as they offer a cost-effective option for deployment. With elastic and ready-to-use resources, widely distributed data centers, and dedicated support services, organizations can rapidly build and continuously expand their technology infrastructures and save on implementation and maintenance costs.
However, with the ongoing migration of data and services to the cloud, more organizations are at risk of becoming frequent targets of cyberattacks. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023, 82% of breaches in 2023 involved data stored in public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.
By securing cloud compliance for your organization, you can protect your data, assets, and operations from various cyber threats such as unauthorized access and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks and strengthen your security posture. Cloud compliance can also help organizations:
To achieve cloud compliance, organizations must meet the requirements for data protection, cybersecurity, and cloud security set by different laws, regulations, and standards. Here are some of them:
Organizations can harness the power of cloud computing resources, prioritize security, and reach cloud compliance through the following ways:
First, you need to determine your compliance obligations through the laws, standards, and regulations applicable to your organization, including the industry and jurisdictional requirements you need to fulfill. You must then define and classify the assets and data you will store and process within the cloud. Performing risk assessments is a necessary part of this step as it allows you to identify, analyze, and evaluate the risks to your assets and data based on their likelihood and impact, and determine the appropriate remediation actions.
Now, you can proceed with creating a document that outlines your internal policies for cloud security. You can then assign roles and responsibilities to team members and implement controls and incident response procedures, ensuring they are aligned with provisions in regulatory and security frameworks. Access control, data encryption, network segmentation, incident reporting, and endpoint detection and response are a few security controls and protocols you can establish to uphold cloud security and compliance.
The next step is to prepare a legal contract and service-level agreement (SLA) with your cloud service provider. These documents must clearly state the organization’s rules and expectations for the service provider and should contain clauses related to confidentiality and other important considerations. This step also entails understanding the shared responsibility model, in which responsibilities over the entire cloud environment are divided between the cloud service provider and the organization. For instance, the provider may be in charge of the security of the cloud infrastructure, but it is up to the organization to configure the security of their data and the services they will use. This lessens ambiguity in terms of liability and guarantees accountability.
Proper onboarding is a crucial step in the process of cloud compliance. This involves verifying the compliance status of your cloud service provider by reviewing their documentation and certifications. It also includes establishing an onboarding process to gather all necessary information from your provider seamlessly. Create onboarding forms and conduct vendor risk assessments to identify and remediate risks and issues associated with your cloud service provider.
Once your security controls are in place, you need to continuously track their performance and effectiveness. Continuous control monitoring enables the automatic testing of your cloud security controls, detecting and sending real-time alerts of non-conformities, control failures, and security incidents. This allows your organization to proactively address compliance gaps and maintain consistent cloud compliance.
Finally, regularly examining your compliance posture enables you to continually improve your policies and controls and ensure that they are aligned with regulatory requirements. Perform security assessments and internal audits to review your cloud policies, controls, and risk and incident management procedures and implement corrective measures or address any inefficiencies. This not only reinforces compliance but also helps your organization maintain a strong security culture.
Manage your compliance activities in one integrated platform. 6clicks empowers your organization with robust cloud compliance capabilities such as continuous control monitoring and audits and assessments, as well as solutions for Risk Management, Policy & Control Management, Vendor Risk Management, and Issue & Incident Management.
Switch from manual processes to automated security control testing and ensure continuous compliance. Consistently monitor your cloud environment for configuration issues, anomalies, or areas of non-compliance. Gain enhanced visibility of your risk and compliance posture and get real-time insights into the performance of cloud controls.
Use 6clicks’ AI engine Hailey to automate the mapping of cloud compliance frameworks and regulatory requirements to your internal policies and controls, instantly providing an analysis of your compliance status and easily identifying compliance gaps.
Meanwhile, you can store and manage your cloud-associated risks, conduct risk assessments, and create risk treatment plans within 6clicks’ Risks module. You can also create, manage, and assign responsibility tasks to your cloud controls within the Controls module.
Onboard, manage, and run vendor risk assessments with your cloud provider using 6clicks’ Third Parties module. Then, record, track, and action issues or incidents in the Issues & Incidents module.
Lastly, you can use 6clicks’ built-in assessment templates and custom workflows to streamline your internal audits and security assessments. Expedite the process by automatically generating responses based on previous data using Hailey.
Book a demo with us to experience 6clicks’ full suite of cyber risk and compliance modules.