A secure cloud platform is the foundation of successful digital and artificial intelligence transformation, but the rapid pace of change and expanding scale of threats create new vulnerabilities daily. In addition, cloud attack speed and sophistication are increasing, driven by AI and automation. The range of capabilities needed to defend your cloud estate and rapidly respond to potential threats is growing. The right advisor can guide your team through the cloud security landscape to help you address emerging challenges and gain control over a complex and ever-evolving environment.
An effective secure cloud strategy requires building security into your cloud foundation, combining preventive and detective controls with a defense-in-depth approach that includes monitoring, access controls and encryption. The right approach can protect against potential threats to your data, applications and cloud infrastructure while unlocking developer velocity, speed to market and cost savings.
For many companies, the set of capabilities required to secure their cloud and AI estate is outpacing their budgets and their team’s ability to monitor and respond to an increasing volume of security signals. The modern cloud and AI security stack includes a menagerie of tools—such as CSPM, CWPP, CNAPP, CIEM, SSPM, DSPM, AI-SPM and ZTNA—each accompanied by a licensing and labor cost. The list of capabilities and the skills necessary to fully capitalize on solutions can be intimidating for even the most sophisticated security teams. For savvy technology leaders, leveraging managed security services that combine tooling and support is often the most effective way to access the leading capabilities they need while optimizing cost, flexibility and responsiveness.
Secure cloud solutions utilize a variety of emerging technologies and insights to protect your sensitive data, infrastructure and critical applications from evolving cyberthreats. In conjunction, secure cloud services extend across a broad spectrum of platforms that defend data, infrastructure and applications in the cloud.
Core components of secure cloud solutions include:
| Cloud cost management and FinOps (financial operations) | Improves visibility into cloud spend while reducing risk by identifying inefficient, unnecessary or unmanaged resources |
| Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) | Enforces least-privilege access across your cloud environment, confirming users and systems have only the permissions they need—and continuously auditing for privilege drift |
| Cloud operating model | Establishes governance, roles, responsibilities and security considerations for a secure cloud foundation |
| Cloud security posture management (CSPM) | Monitors your cloud environments continuously for misconfigurations that create data breach vulnerabilities |
| Cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) | Secures server workloads, including virtual machines, serverless functions and containers |
| Cyber incident response and cyber resilience | Prepare your organization to detect, contain and recover from cloud incidents efficiently—minimizing downtime and protecting business continuity when threats materialize |
| Data encryption | Encrypts your information both at rest (stored) and in transit (moving across networks) |
| Data loss prevention (DLP) | Leverages tools that discover, classify and secure your data to prevent the unauthorized transfer of sensitive information |
| DevSecOps transformation | Embeds security into the software delivery lifecycle through automation, collaboration and continuous improvement across cloud-native environments |
| Identity and access management (IAM) | Restricts access to only authorized users by utilizing multifactor authentication and the principle of least privilege |
| Infrastructure as code (IaC) and policy as code (PaC) | Enable a development, security and operations (DevSecOps) approach supported by automated continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines, automating security and identifying vulnerabilities earlier in the development process, when they are less costly to fix |
| Platform design, development and deployment | Provides secure landing zones, account hierarchy, vending solutions and supporting security controls |
| SaaS security posture management (SSPM) | Secures your software as a service (SaaS) portfolio, surfacing unseen risk, including vulnerable configurations and risky identities that can be exploited by bad actors |
| Secure cloud operations and administration | Implements security controls and remediates cloud vulnerabilities that threaten data and cloud assets |
| Third-party and supply chain risk management | Extends your security posture to the third-party vendors, software dependencies and supply chain relationships that represent growing vectors of attack |
With secure cloud solutions from RSM, you can balance operational efficiency and enterprise protection, leading to a better security posture for your enterprise. Our architects will support your team as you design, develop, deploy, manage and secure your cloud infrastructure. We’ll work with you to build solutions that safeguard your critical data, protect your key processes, support your operations and align with your enterprise IT and business strategies.
RSM’s personalized approach to cloud security
Our secure cloud solution professionals have worked with top middle market and Fortune 500 companies across industries to build out cloud security programs. We know what “good” looks like. We’ve also been called on to help our clients fix stalled or failing cloud security programs. We lean on this experience to guide our clients around common pitfalls in building their cloud security programs.
Our experienced team is skilled in securing all major cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Our proven approaches have been applied to single cloud, multicloud and hybrid environments that bridge on-premises and legacy platforms.
Most importantly, we can meet you where you are on your secure cloud journey—scaling solutions to support your needs today and your goals for tomorrow.
Secure cloud services and solutions
Maintaining a secure cloud environment isn’t a one-time process. We’ll continuously monitor, manage and evaluate your infrastructure and services for potential vulnerabilities. Additionally, we’ll use our experience in highly regulated industries to implement strategies that meet or exceed best practices and compliance requirements.
We help protect cloud workloads across virtual machines, containers and serverless environments by implementing the right security tooling, configuration standards, monitoring and controls.
Select and integrate CIEM tools seamlessly. Institute the principle of least privilege to provide users with the minimum level of access required to do their jobs. Bolster your cloud security posture with proven IAM policies and procedures.
SaaS is the fastest-growing cloud service model, with many companies using over 100 SaaS applications. Unfortunately, security practices have not kept up with the explosion in SaaS risk and vulnerabilities, as evidenced by recent high-cost, SaaS-related breaches. Our team of SaaS security professionals can scan your entire SaaS portfolio for unseen vulnerabilities and help you build a program to efficiently manage these risks going forward.
We help organizations embed security and policy controls directly into cloud engineering and application delivery workflows through IaC and PaC practices. Supported by automated CI/CD pipelines, this approach helps identify vulnerabilities earlier in the development lifecycle, improve consistency across environments and reduce the cost of remediation.
We help organizations strengthen identity as a core security control through modern authentication, role-based access, least-privilege design and governance approaches that reduce unauthorized access risk across cloud environments.
We help you discover, classify and protect sensitive data across cloud environments using DLP capabilities and related controls designed to reduce the risk of unauthorized sharing, transfer or exposure.
We help protect sensitive information through encryption strategies for data at rest and in transit, supporting stronger confidentiality, resilience and alignment with security and compliance expectations.
Start with a secure foundation. We can develop a cloud operating model that outlines roles and responsibilities, governance processes and security considerations. In addition, we can build an architecture that grows and adapts as your organization matures, using proven frameworks to establish the highest levels of protection.
Our team will develop and deploy a secure cloud foundation for your estate, designing landing zones, account hierarchy and vending solutions. We surround that estate with the most appropriate security tools and enable conditional access through zero- and adaptive-trust models. We’ll also migrate your workloads to the cloud securely and retire legacy environments.
Our experienced cloud engineers can serve as your cloud security squad, implementing security controls and remediating cloud vulnerabilities that threaten your data and cloud assets. Alternatively, we can provide cloud engineering insight to upskill your teams and provide application delivery teams with the cloud knowledge they need to move forward.
Developing, securing and operating at cloud speed and scale is impossible without automation. Humans alone simply can’t keep pace with the rate at which a cloud estate changes, grows and adds new features. Our DevSecOps transformation strategy helps your organization embed security seamlessly into every stage of the software delivery lifecycle—without slowing innovation. We align people, processes and platforms to automate security; improve collaboration among development, security and operations teams; and reduce risk across cloud-native environments. The result is faster, more resilient delivery, with security built in by design rather than bolted on at the end.
A cost-efficient cloud is a secure cloud. Often, cloud resources are created and left to sit racking up charges while half-built experiments create security risks. One of the fastest and most efficient ways to improve your cloud security is to delete unused resources. Bad actors can’t hack what doesn’t exist. Our cloud FinOps solutions help you identify and remove zombie resources that are running up your bill and making you less secure—a two-for-one return on investment.
Is your incident response team ready for a cloud incident? Many security operations center and incident response teams were built using legacy processes tailored for an on-premises world and have lagged in updating processes to monitor, detect and respond to cloud incidents. RSM prepares your organization with cloud-integrated incident response plans, tabletop exercises, recovery architecture and business continuity frameworks. We can help you answer the following questions before an incident occurs: How quickly can we detect a breach? How do we contain and eradicate it? How fast can we recover operations? What evidence do we preserve for regulators and insurers? We can then implement our managed security solutions to provide the capabilities you need to secure your cloud.
Modern cloud environments are only as secure as the vendors, APIs and software they rely on. RSM extends your security posture beyond your own perimeter—assessing third-party risk profiles, establishing vendor security requirements, monitoring supply chain relationships continuously and helping you build contractual and technical controls that protect your data wherever it travels.
Frequently asked questions
The rapid pace of change frequently creates new security threats, including a growing attack surface due to multiplatform environments and heightened vulnerabilities because of the expansion of remote and hybrid work. These emerging challenges can be addressed with secure cloud solutions that balance operational efficiency with organizational protection.
Cloud security solutions leverage emerging technologies and deep insight to protect data, infrastructure and critical applications from emerging cybersecurity threats.
An effective secure cloud storage strategy combines cloud computing with proven security solutions such as monitoring, access controls and encryption to protect against threats while creating cost savings and enhanced flexibility.
Leading secure cloud solutions leverage multiple components, including IAM, data encryption, data loss prevention, cloud workload protection platforms and cloud security posture management.
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