A Blueprint for Boards to Secure Cloud Transformation

Over the past five years, we’ve witnessed an unprecedented digital transformation boom, catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Many organizations encountered a critical juncture: execute emergency digital transformations to facilitate remote work and digitalize manual processes or face the risk of going out of business. 

Although the situation is no longer as dire from a business perspective, challenges persist. In the rush to migrate operations to the cloud, security often took a backseat to productivity—leaving organizations vulnerable to cyber threats. Additionally, many companies continue to lack in-house cloud expertise and resources, so even new cloud deployments and enhancements of existing implementations can result in misconfigurations, security gaps, and application vulnerabilities.

Today, the stakes are too high for security to be ad hoc or an afterthought. According to CrowdStrike’s 2024 Global Threat Report, cloud intrusions increased by 75 percent year over year. Moreover, according to IBM Corp.'s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024, the global average cost of a data breach was $4.88 million.

Left unaddressed, efforts to transform the business could lead to a significant security crisis—the consequences of which are profound. To prevent this, directors should provide direction on cybersecurity so that cloud transformation is done safely and effectively. 

Common Pain Points

Before boards can provide oversight, however, they first must understand the challenges security teams face when it comes to the cloud. In addition to increasing cyberattacks, below are a few common pain points: 

• Architectural complexity. Organizations often adopt multiple cloud platforms and services to support dynamic operational needs and scale infrastructure efficiently. However, this approach has resulted in decentralized deployments, often without centralized oversight, making it difficult to maintain consistent security standards across the organization.
• Limited visibility. Multicloud environments often also cause limited visibility into cloud assets and potential redundancies in security tools, negatively impacting threat monitoring, detection, and response.
• DevSecOps. Organizations need to develop rapidly to remain competitive, and now they must also do so securely through DevSecOps, or development, security, and operations, programs. When struggles arise, however, developers often revert to old practices and prioritize speed over security. 
• Cloud compliance and reporting. Organizations are expected to adhere to compliance and reporting standards set by industry, state, federal, and even international entities, but poor visibility into data and inconsistent security and governance across clouds can impede compliance and reporting.
• Resource constraints. The demand for proficient security professionals capable of managing cloud environments has skyrocketed, yet the candidate pool remains limited. As alluded to earlier, this scarcity can lead to gaps in expertise, resulting in misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and other security risks.

A Cloud Security Blueprint

Developing a cloud transformation blueprint founded on security will help organizations overcome these challenges and unlock value and innovation without the risks. The following are five pillars of secure cloud transformation that directors can take to their business leaders and security teams:

1. Secure architecture. Build a resilient, reusable multicloud architecture that incorporates secure-by-design principles, which ensure that technology products are built with security from the start. Doing so enables organizations to take a proactive stance against cyber threats, addressing them with robust cybersecurity strategies, including continuous monitoring, threat detection systems, and regular updates to security protocols.
2. Security tool rationalization. Rationalize existing security tools to help cut costs, buy down security risks, and build resilience by identifying tool redundancies and opportunities to streamline infrastructure. The average mid-enterprise organization has between 70 and 90 technologies in their environment. By rationalizing security tools, businesses can improve visibility into cloud assets and the entire security stack and raise overall security hygiene.
3. Security automation. Automate cloud security processes to achieve a higher deployment frequency and faster time to market. Prioritize continuous integration and continuous delivery to responsibly deploy iterative security enhancements to cloud applications and ultimately drive strong DevSecOps programs. Additionally, automation will allow for continuous enforcement of security policies, ongoing monitoring, and proactive threat detection and response.
4. Cloud governance. Establish comprehensive cloud governance frameworks that align with organizational goals and regulatory requirements. Develop a model that, at a minimum, outlines roles, responsibilities, and financial management to enable oversight of scalable multicloud environments. This will help organizations understand their compliance needs and gain cloud visibility to simplify reporting.
5. People. Identify the right mix of talent appropriate in all transformation stages—from strategy and architecture to deployment and security. Organizations should invest in continuous training and upskilling programs for internal staff to enhance their expertise in cloud security. For companies that lack internal resources, leveraging managed security service providers or cloud service providers that offer robust security solutions can be a cost-effective option to supplement internal capabilities. 

Harnessing the Power of the Cloud

Directors must take an active role in overseeing cloud transformation projects to safeguard their organizations from potentially devastating security crises. This starts with understanding common pain points and how to overcome them with a proven blueprint that has security at its core.

By adopting the five pillars above, any organization can navigate the complexities of cloud transformation to remain innovative and competitive without compromising security. Investing in a secure cloud strategy is not just a technical necessity but a business imperative to build resilience and protect data, reputation, and ultimately, the future of the organization.

Optiv is a NACD partner, providing directors with critical and timely information, and perspectives. Optiv is a financial supporter of the NACD.

Ed Lewis is the director of Optiv’s secure cloud transformation practice. He assists clients with strategic advisory, design, and deployment of security and technology automation solutions and cloud security transformation programs.