Automated Governance for Public Cloud Infrastructure
451 Research Initiates Coverage on Concourse Labs
After many years of limited reliance on the cloud, the world health crises, and its ongoing fallout, have pushed organizations towards large-scale public cloud adoption. While organizations are aggressively enabling automated “self-service” cloud delivery and deployment, to accommodate this shift, security and risk teams have not adapted to the use of technology. As a result, they’re essentially getting steamrolled by the time to market imperative that is driving digital transformation.
As the gap widens between cloud risk and organizations’ ability to govern it, they must rethink security and risk management and adapt to an approach that is as agile and scalable as the cloud itself.
Understanding the need for this type of guidance, 451 Research recently initiated coverage on Concourse Labs, with their recent report: For Concourse Labs, Enterprise Cloud Governance Requires More than Just Cloud Security.
Concourse Labs is on a mission to modernize cloud governance. By redefining it as a data problem – shifting from spreadsheets and unstructured data to Policy-as-Code – organizations can address the need for continuous controls over continuously changing cloud environments. This novel approach also enables organizations to move towards a zero-trust model, from trust and sometimes verify to never trust and always verify.
451 Research states, “Concourse Labs’ team has a deep understanding of the requirements and organizational dynamics at play within larger companies working on cloud transformation and have incorporated this knowledge into its offering.”
Our specialized knowledge starts with an understanding that organizations are a complex mix of business units, people, geographies, and technology. And as such, behavior appropriate in one part of an organization may likely be inappropriate elsewhere. Concourse Labs gives customers the ability to define policy hierarchy in a way that works for every part of their organizations.
The report goes on to say, “This addresses key concerns for larger clients that need governance at scale. Policy definitions are cloud-agnostic but are then translated into specific dialects for each cloud environment.”
By automatically translating ‘plain language’ policy into technical controls, teams can verify the underlying cloud infrastructure without knowledge of how it works. They can also apply the exact same policies (e.g. encrypt all data at rest) to different stacks like AWS, Azure, and GCP.
With defined sets of human-readable cloud policies, “customers can then evaluate the live target environments – or proposed environments, in the case of integration into CI/CD pipelines or developers testing policies before commits – against policies as defined earlier – either individually or applied hierarchically – and obtain customized reports for each surface.”
Finally, Concourse Labs provides a system of record for cloud governance, along with a verifiable and auditable database of cloud usage history. This “single source of truth” enables organizations to prove their state of compliance at any point in time, current and historical.
Learn more about how Concourse Labs is modernizing cloud governance by reading the full 451 Research report, For Concourse Labs, Enterprise Cloud Governance Requires More than Just Cloud Security.
