According to HashiCorp’s 2024 State of Cloud Strategy Survey, security is the top factor cloud-mature organizations use to gauge cloud success and the key benefit they derive from their cloud strategies. To reach high cloud maturity, organizations must rethink both Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (ILM) and Security Lifecycle Management (SLM), especially in multi- and hybrid-cloud environments.
ILM focuses on building, deploying, and managing cloud infrastructure, while SLM ensures the protection of sensitive data from creation to expiration. A robust SLM approach, built on a zero trust, identity-based access model, continuously secures credentials and secrets while ensuring authorized connections between services, machines, and personnel.
Cloud adoption typically progresses through three stages of maturity: adopting, standardizing, and scaling. In the adopting phase, companies familiarize themselves with cloud provisioning and manage static secrets to reduce security risks. In the standardizing phase, they implement consistent policies to secure their cloud
infrastructure, reducing person-hours through automation. Finally, the scaling phase allows companies to automate complex processes like PKI certificate management, extending their security capabilities across multiple cloud environments.
By aligning ILM and SLM strategies with these stages, organizations can reduce their attack surface, ensuring security and compliance as they scale operations across multi and hybrid-cloud environments.
