Organizations across industries migrate workloads to the public cloud to gain benefits such as worldwide availability and on-demand services. But for many, security is usually an afterthought in the development lifecycle. This reluctance is largely because it can seem daunting to do security well — but it doesn’t have to be. With help from cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools, organizations can bake in security as they innovate.

A complimentary CDW Cloud Security Posture Assessment can show you how CSPM tools can help your organization streamline its cloud security efforts.

Containers can help organizations achieve their business objectives quickly and efficiently. These software instances package up code and all its dependencies to enable applications to run quickly and reliably among multiple computing environments. This portability makes containers a great fit for microservices and other modern methodologies that support DevOps development processes.

When the pandemic hit, organizations with agile development frameworks such as DevOps had an advantage over competitors that didn’t: The speed and agility that DevOps provides in creating new applications let them quickly adapt to changing conditions. Those that weren’t able to employ DevOps had to develop new capabilities using less agile development processes, which generally take much longer. The success that organizations had with DevOps and containers helped solidify them as essential elements of an agile development mindset.

Using DevOps processes, a monolithic application that used to take three years to build can be broken down into a number of small applications, each of which can be developed much more quickly and easily. Features are developed and bugs are addressed rapidly, and new iterations of software are produced continuously.

Due in part to widespread remote learning, the public cloud has claimed an even greater role in K–12 education over the past year than it held before. Public cloud resources bring benefits such as elasticity, but they can also put school systems at risk of cyberattacks and data breaches if organizations don’t take appropriate security measures.

The following five steps can help K–12 schools keep their cloud environments as secure as possible.

Cloud computing can quickly become a double-edged sword. Cloud services are so easy to scale that they can become unwieldy, with IT staff lacking the visibility and structure to manage their cloud environments effectively. Frequently, we find that organizations are overprovisioned, paying for more than they need. In some cases, they have idle resources, often for storage, which also represent unnecessary costs; in others, they may be unaware of security vulnerabilities, such as open ports.

When organizations reach this point, they often engage a partner to optimize instances, identify unused resources and regain control from cost and security perspectives. We offer this kind of support through our Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure Optimization assessments. Our goal is to enable customers to create more structure around the cloud so that they can strengthen monitoring and management of these resources.

The public cloud offers significant benefits of flexibility and scalability. But it also comes with challenges — especially with regard to security. CDW’s complimentary Cloud Security Posture Assessment is designed to help organizations in this area.

If your organization finds itself dealing with security and compliance challenges in the cloud, here are some key reasons why you might consider engaging us to conduct a CSPA.

As many organizations shift elements of their IT infrastructures to the public cloud, they must be aware of the new risks this move carries. Often, organizations make the false assumption that, in outsourcing the ownership of hardware and data center operations, they have also outsourced security to the cloud service provider.

While this is partially true because the organization is no longer required to deal with physical and infrastructure security, stakeholders are still responsible for compliance, data security, application security and possibly platform security if they are managing their own virtual machines or containers. A CSP’s documentation of the shared responsibility model will explain in more detail where it delineates responsibility.