How an International Management Consulting Firm Achieved Future-Proof Cloud Security

Cost savings and flexibility are often the initial catalysts for cloud services adoption, but for large organizations with multiple sites around the world, the cloud can mean a significantly improved experience for both users and the teams managing IT service delivery. So, when IT leaders at a leading international consulting firm began planning their multi-year technology strategy, it was natural to propose a migration of several critical services to a cloud delivery model. This would not only improve the overall quality of their IT service delivery but also help them realize their long-term goals of increased flexibility and cost-reduction.

However, before the project could gain momentum, cloud migration efforts were brought to a halt when concerns over data security and privacy arose. As a consulting firm, they had a contractual obligation to keep their customers’ data secure and private. This is especially important when clients operate in sensitive industries such as financial services. The firm’s security team cited, reasonably, the real risks of cloud service providers’ cleartext data access and the loss of security controls that would result from moving data off-premises. The organization’s IT security leadership initially prohibited any client data from flowing into the cloud. Additionally, due to the global nature of the business, concerns were raised over potential issues with meeting local data residency requirements in regions where the company actively consults.

Despite these objections, however, the company felt a move to cloud services could offer a significant advantage if they could find a way to ensure their clients’ data remained secure and private. Additionally, the potential to integrate with and grow across multiple cloud offerings in the future appealed to the team. Determined to find a solution, the consulting firm’s IT team set out to find a vendor that could help them satisfy their requirements.

Selecting the Vaultive Cloud Security Platform

After exploring several options, including point-to-point encryption and traditional cloud access security broker (CASB) capabilities, the firm decided that the Vaultive Cloud Security Platform was best equipped to meet their needs. In particular, the Vaultive platform’s unique ability to encrypt data before it flows into the cloud and provide the customer with sole control of the key(s) was enough to overcome the company’s data privacy and security concerns. Furthermore, since the Vaultive platform can support multiple instances in different geographies, it allows multi-national organizations to encrypt data separately in each jurisdiction per the requirements and regulations of the region. Encryption keys are held within each territory, laying to rest the firms concerns over data residency regulations.

In addition to cloud encryption, Vaultive also offers granular policy controls as well as auditing and alerting that that will help the firm enforce consistent security and governance on all cloud computing activities in the future. After several extensive rounds of security and performance testing by two separate teams, the Vaultive platform was deployed globally, and the firm began their first cloud project, securely migrating their email from on-premises Microsoft Exchange to Exchange Online.

Now the company is exploring additional cloud options with the knowledge that Vaultive’s unified security and governance controls and ability to quickly secure new services without the need for custom development. They have the flexibility to select the best cloud service for the business requirement at hand with the confidence that they will be able to apply a consistent and effective security approach.

If you’re looking for a future-proof cloud security strategy for your organization, get in touch, let’s talk about how we can help.

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