How do companies in highly regulated industries adhere to security and compliance with Azure?

The ease and cost-effectiveness of public cloud has drawn many organizations to Microsoft® Azure, where they can move workloads to an environment with instant scalability and gain access to advanced tools and controls.

But with all these features and security offerings, how do enterprises in highly regulated industries adhere to the strictest security and compliance regulations with Azure?

We have a lot of customers that are in industry verticals that require specific regulations, and part of the challenge is knowing what you have to be compliant with, in regard to a specific field. Microsoft has worked extensively with Azure, specifically around Azure policy – on which clients are able to set up what are known as ‘Initiatives’. These Initiatives can be set up, tracked against, audited against, and also remediated against.

For example, if you had a certain Payment Card Industry (PCI) requirement, you could set up an initiative, tag it to your workload and across your entire environment to disallow certain tasks.

With these guidelines, you set certain guardrails that you’ll be able to monitor. You can also set up automation that enables Azure to automatically block certain types of action from being misconfigured. If they were misconfigurations, Azure could also automatically remediate those.

SAP security for highly regulated industries

Beyond quantifiable software licensing and maintenance costs, other costs associated with implementing a new solution often include incremental IT infrastructure (and associated administration and maintenance costs), solution administrator training, GRC implementation consulting services, end-user training, documentation, and ongoing support services.

For our clients who also require a Governance Risk and Compliance partner for their SAP environments, our solution, ControlPanelGRC, has no additional infrastructure or associated costs required.

The solution runs within existing client SAP systems simply as additional software functionality. Training and GRC implementation are measured in days, not weeks or months. Generally, ControlPanelGRC can be implemented incrementally, without interruption or retraining outside the specific functionality of being ‘turned on’.

Finding the best fit for your organization

To ensure you’re reaping all the benefits of multicloud, understanding your business needs and planning accordingly for your entire environment is paramount.

To best solve your business problems, we partner with organizations like yourself to break things down and ask questions like:

·     Define your problem

·     What has already been done to solve the problem?

·     Is this a human or a process issue?

·     Will the problem be solved by applying technology and;

·     Which technology would best solve these issues?

Finding the best fit is not a brand, it's a breed. And everybody goes for the best of breed solution, whether it's for accounting or engineering or CAD drafting. So, no company has a completely homogenous environment.

At NTT, we guide organizations through the cloud transformation process so they can avoid challenges and create the cloud environment that works best for them. With Azure, these organizations gain resources that are easy to deploy, and with the flexibility to scale up and down as their business requires.

Contact us today to discuss a cloud transformation to Microsoft® Azure.