After remaining skeptical to manage cloud regulatory compliance and security of sensitive information assets on the cloud, businesses are adopting cloud computing at scale. With the transition of their mission-critical IT workloads and apps to the cloud, their security is possibly a tradeoff between cost and performance of the cloud service. This is because government institutions have mandated different policies on cloud computing, failing to abide by these policies will impose fines as well as legal implications on businesses. Today organizations that fail to protect user information stored in the cloud because of a lack of security measures as mandated by regulatory compliance are known to lose the trust and brand loyalty of the users. Businesses need to understand cloud compliance regulations and follow best practices on cloud security and governance.

Vital Stats of Cloud Compliance

Organizations that wish to move existing workloads to the cloud often find compliance with cloud-based solutions challenging. Some of the vital stats related to cloud compliance that have been revealed from surveys include:

• Over 90% of the IT and security professionals understand the significance of cloud compliance for their organization and half of these professionals are not concerned about noncompliance penalties.
• 50% of the organizations face audit and compliance challenges that come with Infrastructure as a Service cloud solutions.
• 32% of the organizations discovered that users were assigned with incorrect access authorizations and around 60% are termed, shadow administrators.
• Around 63% of users think about the organization’s data collection and storage practices before sharing critical and sensitive information.
• 65% of organizations believe that real and true encryption is a challenge because of data classification.

Common Cloud Compliance Regulations

Organizations in different industry verticals have to abide by the following common cloud compliances:

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) – HIPAA cloud compliance mandates confidentiality, privacy, and security of electronic healthcare-related and insurance-related information.

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) – It is a set of security standards that allow organizations to process, store, accept, and transmit financial and credit card information.

Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) – As per this act, organizations need to disclose how they are sharing and protecting user information and give users the right to opt out and they can apply specific mandated protections.

Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) – It is a set of rules that organizations have to follow while handling user information for conducting commercial activities.

European Union General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) – It is the most stringent security and privacy regulation that mandates organizations to follow an exhaustive set of requirements while handling the data of EU residents. Noncompliance with this regulation will impose harsh penalties on the organizations.

Sarbanes Oxley Act – This compliance mandates requirements on audits, financial disclosures, and controls of information systems.

U.S. State Breach Laws – As per this law, all 50 states of the US mandate organizations to notify the individual in case of security breaches that involve their personally identifiable information.

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) – This organization gives guidelines on technology matters like standards, security, innovation, and economic competitiveness.

Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program – It is a standard program implied for the assessment of security and evaluation of cloud-based systems.

The Ways to achieve Cloud Compliance

To cater to the growing demands of user privacy and information security, cloud compliance regulations are regularly updated. Adhering to the extensive cloud compliance regulations is a challenging task for organizations so the following tips will eventually help organizations to achieve cloud compliance:

• Organizations first should know about all the cloud compliance that apply to them. After this organizations need to understand and optimize the compliance infrastructure accordingly to avoid noncompliance.
• A model of shared responsibility is usually offered by the cloud vendors because of security and compliance, so every organization should completely understand their responsibility and adopt necessary measures to ensure compliance from their end.
• The organization should keep a check on their data in the cloud is accessed and controlled and should also be vigilant on anomalous behavior and identity and access control lapses. Organizations should prefer the principle of least privilege access in which users can access only the necessary resources and information.
• Organizations should regularly monitor cloud compliance to find out the shortcomings of their IT environment, workforce behavior, and organizational culture that may be directly or indirectly violating compliance regulations.
• Organizations should make sure that they have optimized IT asset distribution for minimal security risk because IT workloads are dynamically shared between hardware resources that make the cloud environment.
• Organizations should always encrypt sensitive and vital nosiness information because this will ensure data security even if it is compromised. They can apply multiple security layers wherever possible and necessary.