Cyber Defense eMagazine December Edition for 2021

What’s the Difference Between the Cloud Platforms?
Like supermarkets, all cloud providers have similar offerings, but each takes a slightly different approach.
While by no means a full comparison, we have included a short summary of how each of the leading
cloud provider platforms delivers value in different areas:
• AWS offers the widest selection of services, including compute, storage, database, analytics,
networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security, and enterprise
applications.
• Azure has the benefit of combining productivity and enterprise software (such as Office 365 and
Teams) with flexible cloud computing resources for developers in one platform.
• Google Cloud stands out for its technological advancement around open source technologies,
especially containers, and played an instrumental role in the development of Kubernetes, a
container orchestration platform that is now becoming an industry standard.
What Are the Advantages of a Multi-cloud Strategy?
It is not surprising that most companies are utilizing multiple cloud platforms, since this strategy allows
companies to:
• Optimize access to services: As described above, some cloud service providers are more
specialized in providing certain services than other providers, so it makes sense to select the best
cloud provider for each specific service that you require.
• Spread risk and resilience: It’s always a good idea to avoid ‘putting all your eggs in one basket.’
For instance, if there is an outage or other issue with one cloud service provider, the other cloud
platforms will likely not be affected.
• Reduce cost and dependency: By adopting multiple cloud providers, enterprises can stay
nimble and switch providers to optimize spending, rather than being locked into one provider and
facing high operational costs to move services.
Security and Compliance Challenges of Multi-cloud Environments
Although it makes a lot of business sense to use multiple cloud providers, it can complicate security and
compliance efforts tremendously since security controls and policies should be consistent across the
board. With most native cloud provider security tools only covering their own platform, and not all thirdparty
solutions supporting multiple cloud providers, security and compliance for multi-cloud environments
can quickly become an operational nightmare.
Cyber Defense eMagazine – December 2021 Edition 80
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