Navigating Multi-Cloud Security Challenges

Understanding Multi-Cloud Security

Organizations the world over are moving applications and workloads to the public cloud to take advantage of cost savings, operational efficiencies, and beyond. The goal, ultimately, is to become more agile so as to better meet the needs of their users, partners, and customers.

With this push toward cloud strategies, the public cloud has effectively become the new enterprise data center. At the same time, hybrid and multicloud environments have become the norm. In fact, IDC Research predicted that use of the public cloud for generative AI platforms, developer tools, and infrastructure would surpass that of on-premises systems by the end of 2025.

It's easy to see the appeal. Cloud platforms offer unprecedented speed and reach, with access to hundreds of services at the click of a button. Developers can spin up new environments in moments. Setup and maintenance are dramatically easier than on-premises infrastructure. In short, the cloud continues to redefine what's possible.

More Clouds, More Challenges

However, cloud adoption is giving rise to new security challenges, especially for organizations still using traditional security architectures to secure their clouds. They struggle with:

• Enforcing consistent security policy across multiple platforms. Gaps in enforcement increase the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access.
• Maintaining visibility and control over users, traffic, and shadow IT. Dispersed traffic and IT complexity create blind spots that attackers can exploit.
• Meeting compliance standards across jurisdictions and providers. Weak or misconfigured data security can expose sensitive data and lead to failed audits.
• Managing identities and least-privileged access to sensitive data. Excessive permissions or poor oversight can leave sensitive data vulnerable to breaches.

Traditional Security vs. Multi-Cloud Environments

Traditional, on-premises security architectures were designed for data centers, not the cloud. Attempting to lift-and-shift these solutions often results in costly, complex, and ineffective protections that fail to address the needs of cloud workloads.

Cloud workloads must be able to securely communicate with each other and the internet. The traditional way to achieve this was to build routable networks between cloud environments with firewalls and VPNs, essentially extending the wide area network (WAN) into the cloud. This requires deploying virtual firewalls anywhere workloads reside, resulting in a highly complex, difficult-to-manage architecture.

Additional security capabilities, such as data loss prevention (DLP) or TLS/SSL inspection, require additional virtual appliances, adding still more complexity. Even one cloud environment will necessitate setting up and managing additional virtual firewalls to secure north-south and east-west traffic between cloud workloads. In a multi-cloud ecosystem, this problem grows exponentially.

Should an organization choose to rely on legacy approaches to secure and connect cloud workloads in spite of these hurdles, they must still cope with:

• An expanded attack surface: Each virtual firewall has a routable IP address attackers can discover. The more firewalls deployed, the greater the attack surface.
• Workload compromise: Once bad actors find an entry point into an environment and gain a foothold there, they can compromise workloads.
• Lateral movement: Because all workloads are networked, once threat actors compromise one, they can move across the network to compromise others.
• Exposed sensitive data: As they move across the network, attackers will be able to find and exfiltrate sensitive and valuable data.

Securing Multi-Cloud Environments with Zero Trust

Securing today's increasingly cloud-reliant enterprise environments requires a different approach. Rather than security designed around networks, they need an architecture that treats security as foundational to the design and operation of the network. In short, they need a zero trust architecture.

Zero trust enforces least-privileged access, enabling direct workload-to-workload and workload-to-internet communication without implicit trust. When delivered from the cloud, zero trust leverages the cloud’s scalability to support full TLS/SSL inspection at scale, overcoming the bandwidth and resource limitations of traditional architectures.

By centralizing security and configuration management in the cloud, organizations can enforce consistent policies across multi-cloud environments while simplifying operations.

Key Benefits of Adopting Zero Trust in Multi-Cloud Environments

This new, modern approach:

• Eliminates the attack surface. Unlike with a legacy approach built on a routable network, workloads become effectively invisible to threat actors.
• Delivers scalable threat and data protection. Full inline TLS/SSL content inspection and DLP capabilities enable robust security at scale.
• Prevents lateral threat movement. Providing direct connectivity with no connection to a network renders lateral movement impossible.
• Reduces costs and complexity. Centralized management of cloud configurations and security, along with direct connectivity, saves time and effort.

Zero Trust Requirements for Multi-Cloud Security

Secure Workload-to-Internet Traffic

Cloud workloads depend on regular communication over the internet, so securing outbound connectivity is vital. A simple direct-to-cloud architecture should provide secure internet access for all workloads, whether they’re hosted in public clouds or enterprise data centers.

To secure workload-to-internet traffic, you’ll need:

• Full proxy-based TLS/SSL inspection to identify and block threats hidden in encrypted traffic
• Advanced malware protection to stop zero-day threats before they reach your workloads
• Site filtering to ensure workloads can only connect to approved destinations
• Zero attack surface to make workloads invisible to unauthorized traffic

For example, if apps in AWS West and AWS East both need updates, an effective zero trust platform can enforce security policies while securely routing traffic between workloads and an update source—ensuring seamless, secure communications.

Secure Workload-to-Workload Traffic

Securing workload-to-workload connectivity, both across multiple clouds and within individual VPCs, is also crucial. This involves routing all such traffic through a central zero trust platform to enforce policies and authenticate connections using identity and context.

Key capabilities include:

• Secure multi-cloud and multi-region connectivity to ensure workloads in different clouds or regions can exchange data safely
• Inter-VPC/VNET connectivity that routes traffic through a central security platform to enforce zero trust principles
• Preventing lateral threat movement by removing pathways attackers could exploit
• Zero trust network access (ZTNA) to eliminate the attack surface and ensure workloads don’t connect directly to routable networks

For instance, traffic traveling between VPCs could be routed through a private service edge, where secure connections are brokered between source and destination apps.

Enforce Granular Microsegmentation

An essential layer of security, microsegmentation prevents lateral movement by dividing workloads into small segments based on individual apps' communication needs. Workloads can only communicate only within their designated segments, ensuring zero trust policies are enforced at the application level whether in the cloud or on-premises.

Core capabilities for microsegmentation include:

• AI-powered resource discovery to identify workloads in real time
• Host-based and non-host-based segmentation to create dynamic security layers
• Granular segmentation across VPCs/VNETs to ensure comprehensive protection

This makes it possible to enforce granular zero trust policies throughout the entire network, not only its perimeter, eliminating gaps and ensuring workloads stay secure no matter where they reside.

How Zscaler Can Help

Zscaler delivers comprehensive zero trust security for multi-cloud workloads with the cloud native Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange™ platform.

• Enforce comprehensive threat and data security with standard controls across environments
• Eliminate lateral movement with segmentation between and within clouds, VPCs, and VMs
• Reduce complexity and costs by eliminating firewalls, proxies, and expensive private connectivity
• Deploy in the form factor that suits your operations, using a virtual machine or managed gateway