New Delhi, July 25 -- India's digital economy is experiencing growth, and the banking, healthcare, and government sectors are propelling enterprises toward multi-cloud adoption. The rapid adoption of multi-cloud ecosystems has transformed how enterprises operate, providing unprecedented flexibility, scalability, and innovation. However, as organisations integrate services from multiple cloud providers, the challenges of managing identity security become increasingly apparent.
Progress does not come easy. The report titled, "Orchestrating Multi-Cloud Identities - A Unified Approach to Access Management," sheds light on organisations within regulated industries that rely on aging ecosystems missing modern host identity security technologies. Multi-cloud environments bring with them a diverse and fragmented security landscape, where each provider operates its unique identity and access management framework. This complexity creates significant challenges when it comes to ensuring consistent and strong protection for both human and machine identities.
The Identity Gap: Fragmentation and Visibility
Identity management across clouds requires a high level of coordination. An industry study found that 58% of Indian organisations do not have identity security controls in place to secure cloud infrastructure and workloads. In multi-cloud environments, identity sprawl has emerged as a critical challenge. Each cloud platform introduces its own set of credentials, permissions, and roles, often leading to a proliferation of identities that are difficult to manage. The lack of visibility across these platforms makes it harder to enforce consistent access policies and monitor for anomalies, leaving organisations vulnerable to unauthorised access and potential breaches.
This issue is compounded by the accelerated adoption of machine identities, such as API keys, service accounts, and certificates, which are essential for seamless interactions between cloud services. Unlike human identities, machine identities often lack the same level of oversight, making them an attractive target for attackers.
Barriers to Modernisation
The road towards achieving a secure multi-cloud environment is normally held back because of outdated technology and a lack of required skills. Forrester reports states that 66% of companies face time and resource limitations and 62% report lack of required skills as two of the most important reasons for not upgrading their IoT ecosystems on multi-cloud frameworks. These limitations lead to inconsistent policy enforcement, identity governance, as well as functional silos in IAM solutions across multiple clouds.
Privacy concerns are aggravated by these issues. In India, where the legal framework in relation to data protection is still development, these issues are highly pronounced within the healthcare and financial services sectors. Moreover, maintaining compliance across diverse platforms requires detailed audit trails, consistent enforcement of access policies, and a thorough understanding of how identities are managed across the ecosystem. For organisations operating within multiple jurisdictions, this can be a daunting task.
Towards Strengthened Identity Security: Solutions and Recommended Practices
Indian organisations are beginning to strategically strengthen their identity security postures in multi-cloud environments. The CyberArk-DSCI report emphasises the central role that sophisticated SaaS offerings plays in enabling consolidated identity and access governance by providing centralised IAM for multi-clouds, since it allows centralised reinforced security at the cloud account level. The risk of identity-based attacks are mitigated when controls are anchored and managed at the account level in the cloud.
Investing in advanced threat detection capabilities is also equally important. Identity Orchestration- a new category of software, holds much promise. It supports the adoption of Zero Trust security models by integrating multi-cloud and hybrid identity infrastructures, permitting distributed enforcement of access policy identity-based control.
For machine identities, automation and strong management practices are key to mitigating risks. Tools and processes that enable the automated rotation of secrets, the secure storage of credentials, and real-time monitoring of machine identity activity are critical in preventing unauthorised access. By treating machine identities with the same rigour as human identities, organisations can close gaps in their security posture and reduce the risk of breaches.
Automation makes these use cases possible. Automated identity governance tools enable the rapid provisioning and deprovisioning of access, compliance enforcement, and threat response in real time. In resource-constrained contexts such as those in India, these capabilities are invaluable.
The Road Ahead: Unified Strategies for a Secure Digital India
For organisations that have undertaken or are undertaking their cloud journeys, those that view identity as the new security perimeter and modern IAM policies as unified gateways will more effectively defend their assets and remain compliant.
Achieving these outcomes requires sharper strategic emphasis on modernisation, actionable intelligence, and automation. By employing sophisticated SaaS solutions, adopting identity orchestration frameworks, and implementing Zero Trust philosophies, Indian enterprises can optimally and securely realise the innovation potential offered by multi-cloud environments.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from TechCircle.