Cloud Governance: Unified, Secure, Auditable

Impact at a Glance 

With a unified multi-cloud governance model across AWS, Azure, VMware, and OCI, a leading European digital services provider is laying the foundation for security and compliance – CIS and GDPR ready. The result: faster innovation with reduced risks.

 

Initial Situation & Challenge 

Like many organizations with diverse mandates, the company had adopted multiple clouds for different purposes – analytics, workforce apps, partner workloads, and legacy systems. This complexity created fragmented responsibilities and a lack of centralized oversight – a challenge public sector organizations increasingly face as they modernize IT. The rapid, decentralized expansion had outpaced the company’s internal cloud security expertise, creating a skills gap that made consistent governance nearly impossible. New attack surfaces were emerging at the interfaces between legacy systems and cloud-native services, while leadership lacked a unified view of risk to ensure compliance with stringent regulations like GDPR. 

 

What Was at Stake 

Without a strategic change, the company faced significant and escalating risks that threatened its growth trajectory: 

• Regulatory Exposure: Mounting risk of substantial GDPR penalties and an inability to demonstrate compliance with CIS Benchmarks or the CSA Cloud Controls Matrix, making it impossible to pass audits or demonstrate accountability. 
• Security Blind Spots: Pervasive misconfigurations in critical production services, including insecure object storage that had become opaque and unmonitored storage services for the security team, and overly permissive IAM policies that violated the principle of least privilege. The lack of identity-based segmentation meant a breach could easily spread laterally. 
• Delayed Public Service Delivery: The launch of new services was delayed by weeks due to manual, inconsistent provisioning processes and fragmented governance, directly impacting digital transformation goals. 
• Rising Costs: Inefficient operations and duplicate tooling across AWS, Azure, OCI, and VMware were driving up operational expenses without a corresponding increase in security value. 

 

Our Approach: How We Tackled It  

We implemented a risk-informed cloud governance framework built on proactive, architectural-level security. The approach was transformational, not just technical, emphasizing transparency, audit trails, and policy-as-code guardrails: 

• Proactive Architecture Reviews: We conducted in-depth reviews of High-Level (HLD) and Low-Level Designs (LLD), detecting and eliminating security anti-patterns before they were implemented. These architectural reviews ensured a robust level of isolation and segmentation was in place by design, minimizing the blast radius of any potential security incident. 
• Risk Visibility First: The engagement started by deploying a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tool to create a comprehensive multicloud risk register, turning a landscape of unknowns into a set of actionable priorities. 
• Governance by Design: We embedded policy-as-code guardrails that enforced Zero Trust principles, preventing misconfigurations before deployment and ensuring trust was never implicit in any transaction. 
• Context-Specific Controls: Instead of generic policies, we defined secure blueprints for high-risk services like Kubernetes and Redshift. This included implementing Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM) to right-size permissions and eliminate standing privileges in IAM. 
• Continuous Readiness: All security controls were aligned with CIS Benchmarks, CSA CCM, and GDPR from the ground up, with automated evidence collection to ensure the company was perpetually audit-ready. 

 

Measurable Results from the Partnership 

The implementation delivered immediate, measurable, and lasting improvements to the company’s security posture and operational efficiency, framed as key governance wins: 

• Up to 92% fewer repeat misconfigurations, directly strengthening audit-readiness and compliance assurance. 
• A 65% reduction in standing privileges after implementing CIEM right-sizing principles. 
• Faster, safer enablement of digital services, with provisioning time cut from weeks to hours using standardized landing zones. 
• Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) for cloud security incidents was reduced to ~6 minutes, with a Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR) of ~1.8 hours. 
• Cut audit preparation time by 40%, allowing teams to demonstrate GDPR and CIS alignment on demand. 

This proven approach is now being applied to help public sector organizations build secure, compliant, and efficient multicloud environments – helping them modernize with confidence while ensuring compliance and safeguarding citizen data.