For years GRC advocates have been focused on one message: we can lower risk and gain efficiencies by managing common processes in governance, risk, compliance (and security) across the silos within the business with a common program supporting people, process and technology. The mantra is some variation of test once, analyze across, report many. People are getting it. Yet the work of it has barely begun in even the most advanced of organizations – GRC, while gaining momentum, is still very much in its infancy.
The drivers for GRC are many; I’ve blogged about the Five Forcing Functions of GRC previously. Summarized they are: exploding digital universe, avalanche of regulations, hyper-extended enterprise, virtualization and cloud computing and perhaps the most important: heightened need for visibility from executive and a wide variety of stakeholders.
After this week at the RSA Conference I’m convinced more than ever that one of the five forcing functions – virtualization and cloud computing- in particular, the hybrid cloud - is going to give GRC a majorly big push this year – driving the need for more standardization, visibility and control that GRC can provide.
Hybrid Cloud makes GRC all that more vital. Why? Think of the hybrid cloud as meta-silos – now we aren’t just dealing with the need to integrate GRC across the internal organization – but now across the entire extended enterprise. Yes, we’ve been doing it for years, it’s true, managing dozens, and sometimes hundreds or thousands of 3rd party relationships – but hybrid cloud puts a new twist on the hyper-extended enterprise.
As organizations adopt more cloud computing models, from a wider variety of workloads, managing identity, and information across virtualized and physical infrastructures – we will see the evolution of hybrid cloud management systems. And with this, and perhaps, even in advance of these new cloud management systems – will be specialized solutions that specifically address cloud trust. In effect, we are reaching a point of convergence between GRC and cloud computing.
At the center of this convergence is the hybrid cloud – which is driving the emergence of new platforms that manage GRC across all external and internal systems, whether it is the dozens of cloud service providers that are embedded in your business process, or the internal processes that live within the increasingly porous boundaries of your organization.
RSA’s Cloud Trust Authority is one example of a hybrid cloud GRC platform that leverages the RSA Archer GRC platform, along with RSA envision and DLP – and there will be more. Some will come from the cloud service providers themselves and others from vendors like vmware, EMC and RSA that are taking Cloud trust very seriously.
The push for wider-scale adoption will ultimately come from large organizations that will demand visibility into their providers’ environments. Eventually there will be a tipping point where standardized processes - facilitated by the unprecedented granularity of introspection and controls monitoring that are built-in and automated within virtualized environments - will bring this vision of the hybrid cloud GRC platform to fruition.
So, the Call to Action: take a good look at what your organization is really doing with cloud computing – and imagine what the program and technology architecture will need to be to manage GRC across all of those relationships. Talk to your CSPs and vendors –delve deep leveraging the Cloud Security Alliance Consensus Questionnaire and CSA Cloud Controls Matrix- and explore the possibility that hybrid cloud computing can actually improve your GRC.
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