Why the Cloud-Agnostic Security Platform Is Today's Most Effective Multicloud Strategy

While many workloads may still be on-premises, growth in infrastructure has decidedly shifted toward public cloud, and organizations, looking to future-proof their operations, are moving to the cloud faster than ever before.

Explosive growth in cloud applications that are exposed to the Internet through Web, mobile, and API-based interfaces also means an increased attack surface and increased security risk for organizations, especially for organizations with multicloud strategies across different infrastructure service providers.

As public cloud adoption increases, so does exploitability. This is why organizations are seeking and adopting complementary cloud-native approaches to solve for secure multicloud interoperability.

Adopting a Multicloud Strategy That Works for You
Cloud customers have a wide range of use cases for their workloads in the cloud and benefit from adopting a multicloud strategy to receive best-in-class cloud service for each use case.

Embracing a multicloud strategy gives organizations the advantage of selecting the best-in-class capabilities from each cloud service provider (CSP). In turn, CSPs are specializing in comparative areas of service strength to stand out to customers and maximize their share of the multicloud market.

Organizations now require a unified, consistent, full life cycle, and comprehensive platform that fully integrates with multiple cloud service providers in order to capture all the best-in-class capabilities available in the market.

Single Control Plane to Unify Clouds and Rule Them All
The challenge with expanding into multicloud environments is added complexity, so it is important to manage that complexity and associated cost with unified operations across multiple cloud service providers. The security control plane unifies multicloud to establish security visibility, compliance, and governance that manages and solves for multicloud complexity. And this includes identity and access control and data security across clouds and global teams.

If you use the same security tool everywhere, you can standardize and leverage that experience with the product and it doesn't matter if you're running the tool in your own data center or across multiple public clouds — it works the same everywhere.

An effective strategy for multicloud should deliver scalability within a single pane of glass across every cloud and act as one operational source of truth for distributed teams in need of clarity in their collaborations. The security control plane delivers this multicloud unification and operational ease. Add in security automation capabilities across clouds — commonly seen in the form of out-of-the-box and prebuilt compliance checks, like support for CIS Benchmarks and other regulatory standards — and multicloud quickly becomes very manageable without additional expertise to set up or operate.

In this way, organizations can effectively adopt multicloud environments and run applications with many cloud service providers while gaining the best features of each.

Cloud-Native Security Platforms Called to the Rescue
CSP-native capabilities that benefit just their specific cloud does not support multicloud success. For this reason, an independent software vendor (ISV) — specifically, an agnostic and cloud-unifying security platform — is the catalyst to realize your multicloud strategy and make it effective for operations.

Adopting a cloud-agnostic security platform is by far the most effective multicloud strategy because Cloud Native Security Platforms (CNSPs) deliver a multicloud operational fit with deep multicloud visibility and native context across every ecosystem, while the single platform end-user interface (UI) remains the same for simplicity.

Cloud-native capabilities take full advantage of the speed available within the cloud computing delivery model while the strategic and integrated security drivers of visibility, compliance, and governance deliver insights on multicloud operations status, like time to market and other business performance measures.

With a CNSP delivering multicloud visibility and cloud-agnostic agility, organizations are free to select the best cloud value for every project without having to learn a new set of native services.

Put Focus on Your Customers, Not Learning a New Cloud
CSPs frequently deliver new services, which puts pressure on time-constrained teams to learn how these newly released services fit (or do not fit) into their existing workflows. Instead, adopting a CNSP as a multicloud strategy eliminates the need to keep up with constantly changing CSP environments. Let a cloud-native platform with a focus on security and process fit make sense of new cloud services for you. This way, you are ensuring your organization adopts CSP innovation safely and reliably in accordance with cloud Shared Responsibility Models and industry standards.

And cloud-native integrations deliver more than just time back to the team — they offer confidence to embrace any cloud service provider and get the most value for your environment without integration worries or bottlenecks. With a cloud-native approach, simply choose the best cloud and stack for running your business and CNSPs can operationalize and secure it — both now and in future.

A Cloud-Native Platform Strategy for Best-in-Class Multicloud Capabilities 
CNSPs, due to their integrated nature, deliver capabilities that are inherently comprehensive and include coverage across the full stack, full life cycle, and across all cloud service providers. You can future-proof your cloud operations through a multicloud strategy that prioritizes the unity available from a CNSP. Choose a CNSP that supports as many clouds as possible, including the top five of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Alibaba Cloud.

After adopting a unifying CNSP, correlation and summary of all cloud operations across multiple cloud providers display in a single dashboard, delivering native interoperability across multiple clouds, and securing multicloud workloads and applications at scale. This frees organizations to choose best-in-class capabilities from multiple clouds that fit their own specific use case, effectively leveraging a CNSP as a powerful multicloud strategy to drive modern business.

About the Author

Derek Rogerson is a Prisma Cloud Product Marketing Manager for CSPs and Partners at Palo Alto Networks. Prior to this role, Derek represented product marketing for AppSec vendor Contrast Security for its runtime application self-protection (RASP) and Serverless products; developed GTM for managed security services provider (MSSP) Binary Defense representing MDR, EDR, Managed EDR, and Threat Intelligence products; and six years with the legendary Symantec Security Response STAR team representing the Office of the CTO and its comprehensive security technology portfolio. Derek enjoys diverse geographical and cultural exposure — working for three different federal governments and living in five different countries around the globe.