2020 - The Year the cloud went stratospheric
At the end of 2019, for many enterprises, the journey to cloud was still the big dream. Whilst the cloud remained the destination of choice, the reality of plotting the journey there was causing sleepless nights.
In March this year, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the landscape overnight and organisations responded by deploying and adopting cloud technologies at a rate that was way beyond anyone’s imagination. Those working in IT became the superheroes of the global enterprise, rolling out programmes of digital transformation at breakneck speeds to simply keep businesses in business. But for IT teams, the work isn’t over. Today they are getting to grips with a whole new reality of cloud services and their associated support and maintenance requirements.
“In recent months, IT teams have had their backs to the wall. Many have had to deploy solutions rapidly without the time to adequately understand the full security and configuration implications. The delivery of functionality was the primary, if not the only objective."
Robin Gardner
Strategic Services Director
You've adopted cloud, but have you got a handle on risk and compliance?
According to Xtravirt, a leading cloud consulting and managed services business, many IT teams were under huge pressure to support business survival. They had to identify and implement solutions to ensure that employees could work from home and decisions needed to be made quickly. Whilst IT teams can quite rightly be hugely proud of what was achieved in such a short timeframe, the priority now is to fully understand whether risks have been introduced as a result and set out plans to remediate.
For businesses who took a leap of faith and quickly leveraged cloud solutions, Xtravirt believe the challenge today is two-fold:
- First, how to identify and assess the risk and vulnerabilities within this ‘new and unknown’ environment.
- Secondly, what to do if you don’t have the skills or capacity required to mitigate the identified risks and maintain a healthy cloud environment.
Further, IT teams are also face the unenviable task of the need to manage Board and regulatory expectations against a reality of new platforms and changing business priorities.
Risk and Compliance in the cloud
Perception
Expectations
Audit teams and Board members are expecting:
- Maintenance is carried out in line with policies
- Information Security risks are understood and actively managed
- Regulatory requirements consistently met
Assumptions
Your business leadership is assuming:
- The money spent on transformation will have addressed all the risks
- Cloud just works and someone else takes care of managing it
- You can prove the business is in full control of risk and compliance
Reality
Yet, your reality is working out how to get control of risk and compliance in the cloud:
- Cloud services continually change with new features added and some removed
- Best practice evolves and recommendations are updated persistently
- Skills need to be focused on supporting business survival and growth
- Maintenance is reactive to incidents
Keeping pace with change in the cloud
Technology has always evolved, yet cloud has accelerated the pace of change to a whole new level and continually drives new requirements that are out of an organisation’s control. Whilst on-premise technologies may have a monthly or quarterly standardised patch cycle alongside critical fixes, minor and major updates, in the cloud there is a continuous cycle of requirements to be met. So, just how do organisations keep on top of risks, act on vendor recommendations and updates and adhere to best practice?
Preventative and proactive maintenance should be the mainstay of IT Operations in both a legacy and a cloud world. The process can be dramatically simplified using tools such as Runecast Analyzer which evaluates core technologies in cloud and datacentre environments against vendor knowledge bases, patch guidelines and information security standards.
The partnership between Runecast and leading Cloud Managed Service Provider, Xtravirt, is a response to a growing need to not only report incident counts and resolution times to customers, but also compliance and risk factors, and to provide recommendations.
Xtravirt have embedded Runecast Analyzer in several of their Managed Services offerings including Risk and Compliance Assessments and Cloud Health Checks.
Help is at hand
With a successful track record of accelerating organisations to success through the adoption of cloud technologies, Xtravirt are ready to help organisations like yours get on top of risk and compliance. Please do get in touch if you’d like to:
About Xtravirt
Xtravirt is an independent cloud consulting and managed services business and an official partner of Runecast Solutions Ltd.
We believe in empowering enterprises to innovate and thrive in an ever-changing digital world. Cloud sits at the heart of our service portfolio, with our core areas of expertise being design, delivery and management of digital infrastructure, networking and security, digital workspace, automation, and application transformation. Xtravirt’s next-generation managed services deliver robust and active cloud platform management capabilities, meaning customers can focus on their strategic business objectives. Xtravirt are a trusted partner and advisor to many of the world’s best known and highly regarded brands, including many FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies.
To find out more about Runecast and Xtravirt’s risk and compliance services or request a demo, fill out the form below and organise a call back.