As organizations transition from the data center to the Public Cloud, their compliance requirements move with the documents migrated to the cloud. Not all these documents end up in the same cloud provider for various reasons, such as mergers, departmental preference, aborted migrations, and organizational transitions, to name a few. Many organizations have documents scattered across Box, DropBox, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and Google Docs because of these business realities. When auditors show up at your door, how do you handle compliance and reporting across heterogenous cloud storage platforms?
The reporting tools from Box are not going to deliver the information needed for SharePoint Online. They are competing storage providers with no interest in benefitting the other with their engineering. All these online storage platforms provide an application programming interface (API) to query the files, document metadata, and access logs stored on their platform. A skilled programmer can spend hundreds of hours building reporting tools that ingest the compliance data and create dashboards for presentation. Most organizations find themselves unable to dedicate the time and resources to build that automated compliance platform. These organizations use the bespoke tools from each storage provider and cobble together the required artifacts to meet their compliance goals. The compliance reporting leads to hours of administrative work to download, normalize, and present the compliance data.
Organizations that are manually compiling compliance are reactive. Compliance is only understood after the reports have been gathered and compiled into a cohesive view of the different cloud storage providers. Only then can remediation start to correct those items that are outside of compliance. The IT staff dedicated to this process is not driving the business forward, delivering services that benefit the bottom line.
They are trapped in a loop of auditing and remediation using different toolsets for different providers until they achieve the compliance requirements. The cycle starts all over again during the next audit. Instead of driving the business forward, IT staff is mired in the compliance and remediation trap.
What organizations need in a multi-cloud storage environment is the ability to normalize compliance across these platforms proactively. With an API available for each provider, this is achievable. Compliance rules applied in near real-time allows for the goal of SaaS Continuous Compliance for these cloud file systems. Instead of being reactive to compliance needs, engraining the compliance requirements at the API level allows organizations to be proactive in their compliance. The regular audits become predictable, and remediation of compliance issues happens as they are detected. Through continuous improvement, any issues brought up during an audit are captured as rules and applied, preventing failure in the future.
Innova Solutions sees cross-cloud storage provider compliance as a growing problem for small, medium, and large enterprises. The impact Covid-19 has had moving information workers from the corporate offices to home offices put an even more significant strain on compliance. More organizations are taking advantage of SaaS, which they can deliver to their employees over a home broadband connection. Without the tools to govern these services, employees will exploit the rights and capabilities to their limits to get their job done only discovered during an audit.
That is why Innova Solutions has worked with our partners to provide SaaS Continuous Compliance managed solutions that help businesses maintain proactive compliance in these environments. Using pre-built rule sets, Innova Solutions can offer customers the following benefits in near real-time over multiple SaaS storage platforms plus many, many more.
Monitoring
- File and folder security
- Sensitive data such as credit card, passport & social security numbers stored in documents
- Files and folders exposed to the internet
- Outside organizations with access to documents
- Custom user privileges
- Utilization and licensing of each storage environment for utilization
- Application and user activity monitoring
Action
- Automate onboarding and offboarding for document access
- Lock a file
- Watermark a file
- Permission updates
- Block internet access to documents and folders
- Quarantine and block access to sensitive information
- Change an editor to a viewer
- E-Mail administrators or employees to provide access or alert of changes
Reporting
- View the date and time an action occurred
- View the name of the user or entity who took the action
- Report files containing sensitive information
- Search, sort, filter, and export audit logs across platforms
- Report when a user is provided or denied access
Each organization is unique in its compliance needs. That is why Innova Solutions has the team that can take compliance requirements and translates those into actionable rule sets. That ensures that unique requirements today or tomorrow are met.
If you want to learn more about SaaS Continuous Compliance or Innova Solutions SaaSOps practice, contact us today!
For more information about SaaSOps
Please contact us below. We will reach out to you to discuss how we can improve your SaaS delivery?