By Chor-Ching Fan & David Trout
Businesses can relieve many security and compliance burdens by using cloud services provided by Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure. As these cloud service providers make clear to their customers, security and compliance is a shared responsibility that requires careful evaluation and planning to ensure that services are integrated properly into the customer’s IT environment and are compliant with applicable laws and regulations. Depending on whether you choose a Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model, you will have varying degrees of shared responsibility for compliance, as the inherited controls may be different for each implementation.
The good news is that leveraging cloud-based services eliminates many physical and environmental control responsibilities for customers. Without the need for on-premises data center security, businesses can reallocate resources to other areas of their business while improving threat detection and overall security. But shared responsibility does not eliminate security and compliance headaches altogether. Regardless of the model you choose, you need appropriate security controls and procedures for your data and user accounts. Failure to understand the allocation of responsibility when using cloud services can complicate and slow down your compliance project, making compliance more time-consuming than it needs to be.
But there’s help available for businesses looking to achieve compliance, whether you choose to address security controls internally or take a hybrid approach and leverage inherited security controls provided by a CSP such as AWS or Azure with a shared responsibility model. Rizkly supports compliance work with our SaaS compliance program management app, designed to provide the flexibility and scalability needed to meet all your compliance challenges, along with access to a dedicated advisor to answer questions and guide you to success. With Rizkly, you can achieve compliance objectives without taking your eyes off of your core business. Please contact us. We’d love to talk and show you how Rizkly makes it easy.