Cloud Governance
In today’s digital world, organizations—from startups to enterprises—are increasingly relying on public cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or other cloud service providers to power their operations. These platforms enable rapid development, near-infinite scalability, and global reach, all with flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing. A recent Oracle survey found that 98% of enterprises are using or planning to use multicloud, driven by benefits such as cost optimization, data residency, business agility, and innovation. This multicloud approach allows organizations to leverage the strengths of multiple cloud providers, mitigating risks like vendor lock-in and enhancing operational flexibility. As the cloud continues to evolve, enterprises are focusing on managing complex multicloud environments, addressing challenges such as cloud provider management, networking, and data governance to maximize the potential of their cloud investments.
However, with great power comes great responsibility. Governance refers to a framework of policies, procedures, and controls that manage and regulate the use of public cloud services within an organization is essential to ensure the right mix of security, access management, compliance, cost control, and operational oversight without slowing down innovation or business agility.
Strato-Cloud.io delivers a comprehensive governance framework, solution beginning with AWS, Azure, and GCP—providing secure access, near real-time visibility, and centralized control. Our unified platform eliminates blind spots, automates compliance, and simplifies multi-cloud management, allowing organizations to scale securely without losing control. Strato-Cloud.io allows some policies to be applied out of the box and for enterprises to build and deploy their own using the strato-cloud.io framework in the IaC(Infrastructure as Code) of one’s choice.
This article explores the key principles of public cloud governance, the challenges organizations face and how Strato-Cloud.io solves these problems. We use the terminology “cloud environment” to refer to accounts in AWS, projects in GCP or subscriptions in Azure.
Understanding Cloud Governance
Public cloud governance is the set of policies, processes, and technologies an organization uses to manage its cloud environments securely, efficiently, and in compliance with industry standards.
NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) provides a framework to identify governance needs for businesses by looking at legal, regulatory and compliance requirements and how it may impact business objectives. Here are some of the key pillars of effective governance.
Secure access using temporary credentials
- Implementing consistent roles, permissions, and authentication mechanisms ensures the right people access the right resources for human and non-human users.
- Strato-Cloud.io provides a unified access layer across AWS, Azure, and GCP using temporary credentials reducing risks from credential leakage, account hijacking and unauthorized access.
Security & Visibility
- Real-time logging and monitoring detect threats before they escalate. There are several controls for logging and monitoring, an organization can decide which ones they desire to turn on as there may be cost implications with the controls.
- Audit trails track every action to maintain compliance and security posture.
- Optionally aggregate logs from the fleet for central processing of unexpected events from one or more events. (e.g:, an account whose credentials are leaked where one sees sudden GPU instances)
Compliance & Risk Management
- Services and applications on cloud platforms may need to be compliant with frameworks such as PCI DSS, SOC2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA.
- Strato-Cloud.io governance framework helps automate compliance efforts by enabling turning on/off specific controls needed for a compliance program.
Operational Control & Resource Governance
- It is possible to standardize deployment, monitoring, and incident response automation to ensure consistency across a fleet of cloud environments/accounts.
- Strato-Cloud.io helps prevent policy drift over time across a fleet of cloud environments.
Strato-Cloud.io Governance in Action: Lifecycle Management for Cloud Storage
There are numerous use cases where a uniform policy across a fleet of accounts is desirable. Some examples include ability to aggregate events from a fleet of cloud environments for real time centralized analysis of anomalies of resource usage or security breaches, create a least privileged user to get into the account to review incidents from the first tier support, proactively handle the alerts for resource deallocation to eliminate service downtime, enable uniform logging controls in all cloud environments and many more.
Here we look at an example of applying lifecycle policy for managing objects. For simplicity, this example looks at the application of lifecycle policy for an existing AWS S3 storage bucket in one region using terraform. Lifecycle policies can also be applied to Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage. Similar APIs are also available for on-premises storage systems such as MinIO. In this example, blobs are deleted after a specific time to optimize costs. It is also possible to move the data to cheaper storage options.
# Configure the AWS Provider to us-east-1
provider "aws" {
region = "us-east-1"
}
# Reference existing S3 bucket
data "aws_s3_bucket" "strato-cloud-io-test-bucket" {
bucket = "strato-test-bucket-001"
}
# Configure lifecycle rule for the current bucket
resource "aws_s3_bucket_lifecycle_configuration" "bucket_lifecycle" {
bucket = data.aws_s3_bucket.strato-cloud-io-test-bucket.id
rule {
id = "delete_after_90_days"
status = "Enabled"
filter {
prefix = "" # Empty prefix means apply to all objects
}
expiration {
days = 90
}
}
}
# Output the bucket name
output "bucket_name" {
value = data.aws_s3_bucket.strato-cloud-io-test-bucket.id
} This is a code fragment that shows application of a lifecycle policy to an existing bucket in one account. Applying such a policy to storage buckets in multiple cloud environments becomes complicated and needs additional work. This is where Strato-Cloud.io comes in. It allows one to create a policy, test it locally and provides a platform to roll it out to the entire fleet of cloud environments in IaC (Infrastructure as Code) of one’s choice.
Strato-Cloud.io is a great choice for Cloud Governance and Cloud Management
Strato-Cloud.io provides true end-to-end public cloud governance—including secure access using temporary credentials, visibility, and policy-driven governance beginning with AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Our platform eliminates the complexity of multi-cloud governance while reducing the attack surface while providing seamless compliance, and governance.
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