Multicloud Without Fragmenting Security: The NIST Challenge

More and more businesses are combining services and applications from different cloud platforms within a single infrastructure. For Managed Service Providers (MSPs), protecting these environments means working with technologies that have their own configurations, controls, and security management strategies. As a result, maintaining consistent protection across all of them can easily become an operational hurdle.

NIST is spotlighting the difficulties that arise when security must be extended in a coordinated way across disparate cloud environments. Its new draft outlines 23 security and compliance challenges, highlighting three structural issues: the differences among each provider’s native services, the organizational and staffing complexity involved in managing heterogeneous environments, and the difficulty of implementing centralized security capabilities across distinct cloud environments. These challenges affect areas such as identity management, security telemetry, service configuration, and data protection. For MSPs, understanding how to address this diversity will become increasingly important as their clients’ environments grow more heterogeneous.

The Operational Cost of Fragmentation

When every cloud environment is managed independently, the complexity goes far beyond the sheer number of platforms. MSPs must coordinate different tools, policies, and procedures to maintain a consistent security service across all their clients.

In addition, security telemetry is scattered across various management tools, making it difficult to connect what is happening in the cloud with endpoint, identity, and network activity. The exact same threat can leave signals across multiple layers, but if that information is analyzed separately, gaining full visibility into the incident takes more time and effort.

For MSPs, this fragmentation means repeating work every time they onboard new environments or clients. When each infrastructure requires a different way of managing security, business growth also increases the operational burden.

A Single Standard for Different Environments

The solution isn’t necessarily to reduce the number of platforms clients use. Each company may combine different services based on their applications, requirements, or technology strategy. The difficulty arises when that diversity forces the MSP to develop a different management model for each environment.

A common layer makes it possible to apply policies, centralize information, and maintain a unified view of security, as well as correlating events coming from different layers. A cloud security alert, for example, can take on different meaning when analyzed alongside user, endpoint, and network activity.

This way, MSPs can work from a shared context instead of investigating isolated events and applying different standards to each infrastructure. The technological diversity remains in the clients’ environments, but it doesn’t have to carry over into how their security is managed.

The Unified Security Platform as a Management Plane

A Unified Security Platform (USP) provides this common plane by integrating the management of network, endpoint, identity, and cloud security. Instead of administering each layer through standalone tools, MSPs can manage policies, users, devices, and protections from a single platform.

Centralized management makes it possible to define policies once and apply them consistently, reducing configuration discrepancies and repetitive tasks. At the same time, the various layers share telemetry and threat intelligence, providing a common context to investigate incidents and respond to them without having to manually piece together data from different tools.

Centralization also simplifies client onboarding and service standardization. Automating management, deployment, and reporting makes it possible to maintain a consistent operation as the number of clients grows. For MSPs, this makes it easier to onboard new technologies and cloud environments without turning every addition into a brand-new operating model.

Centralizing management also enables different security layers to work with the same criteria, information, and processes. This way, MSPs can manage diverse environments from a single operational foundation, ensuring that each new infrastructure doesn’t introduce more complexity to security management.

For MSPs, managing this diversity without carrying it over into daily operations will become increasingly important. Maintaining consistent security processes and criteria makes it possible to manage disparate environments efficiently, ensuring that business growth doesn’t mean multiplying management work. Simplifying security administration will be key to scaling without increasing operational complexity.