Multi-cloud Separation of Duties: Critical for Security and Compliance

Running workloads across AWS, Azure, and GCP brings flexibility, but it multiplies risk. Each platform has its own identity model, role definitions, and API surface. Misaligned permissions between clouds create hidden attack paths. One engineer with excessive rights in multiple environments can bypass checks and act without review. In regulated industries, this breaks compliance before anyone notices.

Multi-cloud separation of duties enforces strict boundaries. No single person should have the privileges to deploy, approve, and monitor the same resource across all clouds. This requires consistent policy design. Use centralized identity governance to define role templates, then map them to cloud-native roles. Ensure that keys, tokens, and IAM grants are scoped narrowly and expire quickly.

Audit logs must span all providers. Centralize them in a tool capable of correlating events from multiple APIs. Watch for patterns where one identity is performing high-risk actions in more than one cloud in a short time. Configure alerts to detect privilege escalation and cross-cloud movement.

Automated enforcement is essential. Manual reviews do not scale when you are running hundreds of services in multiple regions. Use policy-as-code to define separation rules. Pipeline gates should reject deployments where role assignments breach those rules. Combine that with just-in-time access to reduce standing privileges.

Security teams need tooling that understands multi-cloud semantics. Traditional single-cloud IAM managers miss the subtle overlaps between providers. Modern solutions can enforce separation of duties even when an engineer tries to bridge isolated environments.

Multi-cloud separation of duties isn’t only about compliance—it’s about resilience. When privileges are fragmented and audited, a single compromised account can’t cascade into a full-scale breach.

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