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Strategies to secure multi-cloud environments in financial services

Financial institutions are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies to enhance agility and resilience. However, this approach introduces significant security complexities. This article explores the key strategies that financial services organizations can implement to secure their multi-cloud environments, addressing challenges related to data protection, compliance, and threat management.

  • Nikita Alexander
  • May 20, 2025
  • 7 minutes

The financial services sector is undergoing a profound transformation, driven by the relentless pursuit of greater agility, enhanced scalability, and robust resilience. A cornerstone of this transformation is the accelerating adoption of multi-cloud strategies. Multi-cloud environments, where organizations strategically leverage services from a diverse portfolio of cloud providers, offer a compelling array of benefits. These advantages include the ability to mitigate vendor lock-in, optimize performance by selecting the best-of-breed services from each provider, and fortify business continuity through redundancy and distributed infrastructure. However, this strategic approach to cloud adoption introduces a new echelon of complexity to the already intricate landscape of cybersecurity.

The unique security challenges of multi-cloud in finance

Financial institutions occupy a unique position within the broader business ecosystem. They are entrusted with the safekeeping of highly sensitive data, ranging from customer financial records to proprietary trading algorithms. Furthermore, they operate within a stringent and often fragmented regulatory landscape, subject to a complex web of requirements such as DORA, GDPR, and PCI DSS. This confluence of factors elevates security to a paramount concern in any cloud deployment undertaken by a financial institution. Multi-cloud environments, while offering significant advantages, present a distinct set of security challenges that demand careful consideration and proactive mitigation.

These challenges include:

  • Data visibility and control

In a multi-cloud architecture, data is inherently distributed across multiple cloud platforms, often residing in different geographic locations and under the governance of different providers. This distributed nature of data makes it exceedingly difficult to maintain comprehensive visibility and granular control over its location, access, and usage. The lack of centralized visibility can significantly increase the risk of inadvertent data leakage, unauthorized access, and compliance violations, as financial institutions struggle to track and secure sensitive information across disparate environments.

  • Identity and access management (IAM)

Managing user identities and access privileges across a heterogeneous mix of cloud environments can be a complex and error-prone undertaking. Each cloud provider has its own IAM system, with its own set of policies, controls, and management interfaces. This can lead to inconsistencies in access controls, making it challenging to enforce the principle of least privilege and increasing the likelihood of unauthorized access to sensitive data. Moreover, the complexity of managing multiple IAM systems can create operational overhead and increase the risk of human error, which is a significant factor in many security breaches.

  • Compliance complexity

Financial institutions operate within a highly regulated industry, subject to a myriad of regulations designed to protect customer data, ensure financial stability, and prevent financial crime. Ensuring compliance with these regulations, which can vary significantly across jurisdictions, becomes significantly more challenging in a multi-cloud environment. The lack of standardized security controls and compliance frameworks across different cloud providers can make it difficult to demonstrate compliance to auditors and regulators. This can result in financial penalties, reputational damage, and loss of customer trust.

  • Threat management

Multi-cloud environments inherently expand the attack surface available to cybercriminals. The increased number of entry points and potential vulnerabilities across multiple cloud platforms provides more opportunities for malicious actors to exploit weaknesses and gain unauthorized access to sensitive systems and data. Detecting and responding to cyber threats in a timely and effective manner requires advanced threat detection and response capabilities that can provide comprehensive visibility and correlate security events across all cloud environments. The lack of a unified threat management strategy can leave financial institutions vulnerable to sophisticated and coordinated attacks that exploit the complexity of multi-cloud architectures.

Key strategies for securing multi-cloud environments

To effectively address these multifaceted challenges and mitigate the inherent risks, financial institutions must adopt a proactive and comprehensive approach to multi-cloud security. This approach should encompass the following key strategies:

  • Adopt a zero trust approach

The zero trust security model represents a fundamental shift from traditional perimeter-based security to a more granular and adaptive approach. In a zero trust framework, no user or device, whether inside or outside the organization’s network, is automatically trusted. Instead, every access request is rigorously verified based on a variety of contextual factors, including user identity, device posture, location, and time of day. This approach is particularly crucial in multi-cloud environments, where the traditional notion of a secure perimeter is increasingly blurred. Zero trust helps to minimize the impact of breaches by limiting the lateral movement of attackers within the network and preventing them from gaining access to sensitive resources, even if they manage to compromise an initial entry point.

  • Implement centralized identity and access management (IAM)

A centralized IAM system is essential for providing consistent visibility and granular control over user identities and access privileges across all cloud environments. This system should enable financial institutions to manage user authentication, authorization, and auditing from a single pane of glass, simplifying administration and reducing the risk of errors. Centralized IAM also facilitates the enforcement of consistent security policies, such as the principle of least privilege, across all cloud platforms, ensuring that users only have access to the resources they absolutely need to perform their job functions.

  • Utilize cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools

CSPM tools play a critical role in helping organizations identify and remediate security misconfigurations in their cloud environments. Cloud platforms are highly configurable, and even minor misconfigurations can create significant security vulnerabilities. CSPM tools continuously monitor cloud environments, assess security posture against industry best practices and compliance benchmarks, and provide actionable recommendations for remediation. These tools can help financial institutions proactively identify and address security weaknesses before they can be exploited by attackers.

  • Encrypt data at rest and in transit

Encryption is a fundamental security control for protecting sensitive data in the cloud. Financial institutions should implement robust encryption mechanisms to protect data both when it is stored (at rest) and when it is being transmitted between cloud environments or between cloud environments and on-premises systems (in transit). Encryption should be applied at multiple layers, including the application level, database level, and storage level, to provide defense-in-depth and ensure that data remains protected even if other security controls are compromised.

  • Implement strong threat detection and response capabilities

The dynamic and distributed nature of multi-cloud environments necessitates the implementation of advanced threat detection and response solutions that can provide comprehensive visibility and real-time monitoring across all cloud platforms. These solutions should leverage a combination of techniques, including security information and event management (SIEM), intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS), and user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), to detect suspicious activity, identify potential threats, and trigger automated responses. Effective threat detection and response capabilities are crucial for minimizing the impact of security incidents and ensuring business continuity.

  • Automate security and compliance

Automation is key to streamlining security and compliance processes in multi-cloud environments, reducing the risk of human error, and improving operational efficiency. Financial institutions should leverage automation tools and techniques to automate tasks such as security configuration management, vulnerability scanning, compliance monitoring, and incident response. Automation can help to ensure consistency in security controls, reduce the time required to respond to security incidents, and free up security personnel to focus on more strategic initiatives.

The importance of a unified security strategy

Securing multi-cloud environments is not simply a matter of implementing a collection of individual security tools and technologies. It requires a holistic and unified security strategy that spans across all cloud platforms and integrates seamlessly with existing on-premises security infrastructure. This strategy should encompass consistent security policies, centralized management tools, and a proactive approach to risk management. It should also emphasize collaboration and communication between security teams, cloud operations teams, and business units to ensure that security is embedded into every aspect of the organization’s cloud strategy. By embracing a unified security strategy, financial institutions can effectively leverage the benefits of multi-cloud adoption while mitigating the associated security risks and ensuring the ongoing protection of their sensitive data and critical systems.