Breaking the Cloud Governance Illusion: Rethinking Cloud Data Security Controls

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations are increasingly adopting hybrid and multi-cloud environments. While these technologies provide flexibility, they also bring new complexities in securing and governing data. Many businesses initially turn to the cloud providers’ native security tools, believing these solutions will meet all their data governance needs. However, as organizations expand and diversify their data environments, they quickly discover that these solutions often fall short of their promises.

The Reality of Native Cloud Security Controls

Cloud platforms like AWS, Snowflake, and Databricks have revolutionized the way businesses store, manage, and process data. While these platforms offer powerful tools to manage data security and access, they are often optimized for specific ecosystems. This results in significant gaps when trying to govern data across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures. Organizations often find themselves facing increased complexity, inefficiency, and security risks as they attempt to rely solely on these native controls.

In this post, we’ll explore some of the key challenges businesses face when relying on native cloud security solutions and why a more comprehensive approach is needed.

Challenges with Cloud Data Governance

As organizations increasingly rely on cloud environments, managing data access and governance becomes more complex. The challenges grow as businesses scale their operations and integrate multiple cloud platforms. In this section, we’ll dive into the key obstacles faced by businesses when it comes to cloud data governance, starting with the most prevalent issue: over-permissioning in access management.

1. Over-Permissioning in Access Management

A common issue in cloud environments is over-permissioning, where users are granted broader access to data than necessary. For instance, in AWS, access controls are often set at the bucket level, which means that a user who has access to one object in a bucket can potentially view all other objects within it. As a result, sensitive data might be exposed to individuals who should not have access, creating security and compliance risks.

In multi-cloud environments, this problem is compounded, as managing access across different cloud systems becomes increasingly complex.

2. Role Sprawl and Bucket Complexity

As organizations work to manage sensitive data, many resort to creating separate buckets and roles for different data categories. While this approach can help limit access, it leads to “role sprawl”—an overcomplicated system of permissions and configurations. Over time, managing these roles and buckets becomes increasingly difficult, especially as organizations scale and adopt more cloud services.

This role sprawl not only increases administrative overhead but can also exceed the platform’s limits, creating operational bottlenecks.

3. Scalability Challenges in Manual Data Access Management

Another significant challenge is the reliance on manual processes to manage data access. For large-scale environments, this manual approach becomes unsustainable. Each access request has to go through a ticketing system, requiring approval and review from multiple stakeholders. This creates delays, reduces productivity, and increases the likelihood of errors in granting access.

As data volumes grow and the number of users increases, organizations struggle to scale their data governance practices efficiently, which can result in missed compliance deadlines and unaddressed security vulnerabilities.

4. Lack of Visibility and Auditability

Native security controls can make it difficult to track who has access to which data, and when. Without comprehensive visibility into user actions and permissions, organizations cannot easily enforce security policies or prepare for audits. The lack of centralized oversight not only creates compliance risks but also complicates the process of securing sensitive information across different cloud platforms.

5. Cross-Platform Governance Difficulties

Managing governance across multiple platforms is another challenge. While some cloud-native tools offer governance for specific services (such as AWS Lake Formation for certain AWS services), they often fail to extend governance to other platforms or services. This results in inconsistencies in how data is protected and accessed, leading to potential security gaps.

Why a Unified Approach to Cloud Governance is Necessary

As cloud environments become more complex, relying on cloud-native security solutions alone is no longer enough to effectively manage data governance. Organizations need a solution that provides unified, scalable, and flexible governance across all their data environments, regardless of the platform.

Without this, businesses risk leaving their data exposed, creating operational inefficiencies, and facing compliance challenges that could undermine the value of their cloud investments.

A Unified Solution for Data Governance

Addressing the challenges outlined above requires a more integrated approach to data security. A solution that centralizes and automates data access management, provides real-time visibility, and enforces consistent policies across all data sources is key to securing hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

This approach not only reduces administrative overhead but also ensures that organizations can scale their data governance efforts as they grow, while maintaining strong security and compliance standards.

Privacera offers Unified Solution for Multi-Cloud Data Governance

Organizations need to rethink how they approach cloud data governance. Relying on cloud-native tools may work for simple, single-cloud environments, but as businesses scale and adopt more complex infrastructures, these tools can no longer meet their needs.

A unified data security platform that centralizes governance and automates access management across all cloud environments offers a more scalable and secure solution to these challenges.

Download our whitepaper “Mastering Data Access” to learn more about how to overcome the challenges of cloud governance. Or sign up for a demo and see how Privacera can transform your data security strategy.