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One of the toughest lessons Ive learned as Ive spent over a decade of my life helping organizations build cloud security programs is how its governance, not technology, thats the real challenge. Yes, the cloud is a dark box full of invisible technical razor blades, but those are manageable with a little time and effort. The real pain isnt around figuring out the tech, but in figuring out how the heck to govern all that tech.

Because the fastest path to failure is to treat cloud governance like your non-cloud IT governance.

Organizations that ignore cloud and let it run wild and free always end up in trouble, and organizations that try to enforce their existing governance end up with just a different set of troubles.

One advantage of my role as a researcher and advisor was getting to see the inside of a wide range of organizations as they managed these issues, and I saw both successes and failures. Over time, patterns emerge. And when it comes to governance, I saw a few threads that seemed to tie things together. I call this The Grand Unified Theory of Cloud Governance:

I believe this encapsulates the essential governance challenges of cloud computing, but to flesh it out further:

Its this essential conflict of decentralized administration with centralized risk moving at a blistering pace that most challenges governance and security. The most successful enterprise governance efforts accept the need for different governance implementations for cloud and non-cloud environments rather than trying to enforce one implementation across two totally different ecosystems. They run in parallel and unite at the top, but each environment is governed using a model optimized for its unique characteristics.

In future posts Ill run through some of the best ways Ive seen organizations govern cloud, but since I absolutely hate posts that raise issues and dont provide answers, here are a few high-level tidbits:

The post The Grand Unified Theory of Cloud Governance appeared first on FireMon.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from FireMon authored by Rich Mogull. Read the original post at: https://www.firemon.com/the-grand-unified-theory-of-cloud-governance/

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The Grand Unified Theory of Cloud Governance - Security Boulevard