Ensuring Cloud Compliance: Considerations for Regulatory Requirements

25 Aug Ensuring Cloud Compliance: Considerations for Regulatory Requirements

Posted at 07:00h in Cloud Compliance by Simon Spencer

Cloud Compliance is simply a necessity for any business to have in the modern world. With so many regulations and acts to protect users and parties from lots of different violations, ensuring that your organisation is aware of the requirements is vital.

This is especially true for cloud computing. As businesses turn towards the cloud as an industry standard, regulatory bodies have also made sure that compliance is appropriate for cloud-based infrastructures. This means that it’s now more important than ever to make sure that you understand the regulations and ensure compliance throughout your organisation.

In this article, we’re going to go over the ins and outs of regulatory compliance requirements, as well as how you can use Azure to ensure compliance throughout your organisation.

Understanding the Regulatory Requirements

There are lots of different compliance regulations that may apply to you depending on your business — however, there are a few key requirements regarding cloud computing that are vital for any business to be aware of in 2023.

The first major set of requirements is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — which is a data protection regulation created by the European Union to protect the privacy of its citizens. GDPR is a regulation that controls the ways that organisations can use and store personal data, to protect from data-based incidents such as breaches and other mishandling of data.

In the United Kingdom, GDPR is codified using the Data Protection Act (2018). This means that GDPR is codified into UK law, meaning that failure to comply could result in hefty legal penalties or even criminal charges, depending on the severity of the infraction.

Similarly, ISO 27001 is an international standard to manage information security that works on three principles — confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. This standard is vital as it ensures that your organisation’s security is to a high level, also ensuring that it is appropriately used.

The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) has lots of different regulations that need to be followed by organisations worldwide, like the one above. These different compliance regulations usually enforce security, data, or technological standards to ensure that worldwide standards are met, and are generally enforced worldwide.

Regarding payments, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is an international standard for organisations that handle branded credit cards from card companies such as Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and JCB. This regulation — mandated by the card brands — controls cardholder data information to eliminate credit card fraud.

There are many other compliance regulations and frameworks that may apply to your organisation, so checking which compliance regulations your organisation needs to follow is vital in ensuring that you remain compliant. Otherwise, you risk — at best — losing access to key services, and — at worst — facing hefty legal repercussions.

Cloud Compliance with Microsoft Azure

Being one of the largest tech corporations in the world, Microsoft is very aware of compliance regulations. Their flagship enterprise cloud computing platform, Microsoft Azure, is fully enabled for compliancy — to ensure businesses can meet their own compliance obligations worldwide.

Microsoft Azure compliance offerings are grouped into four segments, that can help you ensure that your organisation remains compliant for the future —

Global
US Government
Industry
Regional

Microsoft Azure’s multitude of compliance offerings shows that Microsoft has a large awareness of compliance. With most of their tools being compliant with lots of different standards worldwide, you can use their list of compliance offerings to ensure compliance throughout your organisation and make sure that you don’t fall out of compliance.

Ensuring Compliance in Azure

Microsoft Azure has a plethora of offerings available that will help your organisation keep up with the latest compliance developments and requirements — helping you stay in compliance with ease.

Azure Policy

Azure Policy is a real-time cloud compliance tool that will help your organisation keep compliant at any scale.

Using Azure Policy to complete real-time audits will allow your organisation to easily ensure that everything within your Azure setup is compliant — ultimately reducing the number of external approval processes and speeding up the audit process significantly.

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager

Another handy tool when considering compliance is Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager.

While not directly an Azure application, Compliance Manager will help you ensure that your Azure systems are fully compliant with any compliance requirements you need to ensure that they comply with.

Using your compliance score, you can improve compliance within your organisation with ease — Compliance Manager will tell you which actions to take to improve your score, meaning that you can easily take your organisation’s compliance into your own hands.

Azure Blueprints

Azure Blueprints will allow you to create and copy large-scale compliant Azure deployments with ease, meaning that you can stay compliant while also deploying new Azure packages.

You can use Azure Blueprints to create fully compliant templates, meaning that you don’t have to worry about compliance at a later stage when further utilising Azure — the compliance framework will already be there to build upon.

While it seems similar to Azure Policy, Azure Blueprint in fact works with Azure Policy to create these compliant blueprints with ease — meaning that you can utilise the compliance checking power of Azure Policy with Azure Blueprints.

Conclusion

Compliance is an important consideration for any business — the repercussions of not remaining compliant could be huge for any organisation, which is why staying in compliance is so vital.

Microsoft Azure offers lots of different ways to ensure compliance, meaning that you can easily keep track of your compliance regulations and ensure that all of your Azure services are fully compliant.

If you’re looking to ensure that your organisation is compliant, reach out to us today. Our experts will be able to help you work out which compliance regulations apply to your business and help you set up the correct Microsoft Azure compliance tools to ensure that you can stay within compliance in real-time.