New Paper: Assuring Compliance in the Cloud

Cloud transformation and the adoption of modern DevOps technology presents both opportunities and challenges for IT compliance functions. With DevOps style application development, the feedback loop for developers and engineers is much tighter than with traditional application development pipelines, enabling speed and agility of application release cycles. While speedy CI/CD is a critical advantage of DevOps, it also shifts compliance left in the development timeline, and therefore puts pressure on the IT risk & compliance organization to modernize their approach to regulatory compliance as well. With the ongoing shift towards cloud technologies and DevOps, modernization of regulatory compliance is no longer optional for an IT compliance function

Compliance modernization is a broad mandate that spans the way the function is governed; the tools, technology, and analytics it uses; the number and nature of its connections to other parts of the business; verifiability and auditability of the controls’ evidence, the expectations assigned to it; and more.

Public cloud technology is becoming a core part of many industries today, and with this comes some potential risks such as cloud misconfigurations exposing intellectual property, loss of physical control of assets, skillset scarcity around cloud based security and compliance. 

Given the constantly changing risk landscape, it is critical that regulations more closely align to address these risks. As regulations and risks evolve, the aim of a modern compliance function is to help an organization stay compliant as it goes through a digital transformation. As organizations go through digital transformation, IT compliance also needs to transform -- via upgrading the technology stack, modifying the business processes and most importantly re-skilling people to become cloud aware.

Today we are releasing the new paper by Google Cloud’s Office of the CISO. In the paper we reveal a new approach for modernizing your compliance approach using modern approaches and Google Cloud toolsets. Your team can leverage the paper to add value to enterprises, both by charting a course to the safe use of cloud technology and by reducing risk through the use of the public cloud.

Read the paper “Assuring Compliance in the Cloud.”

Also, review these related resources:

• “Risk Governance of Digital Transformation in the Cloud“ paper

• “Making Compliance Cloud-native” (episode 14) with Zeal Somani

• Google Cloud Compliance resource center

• Our compliance blueprints: PCI DSS on GKE and GCP FedRAMP Blueprint

• Google Cloud security best practices center