# What is Multi-Cloud Security?

> Multi-cloud security is an industry term for protecting an organization’s use of cloud services from more than one cloud provider.

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## Content

The services may be independent or connected and may span infrastructure, platform, and software delivery models. The defining issue is provider plurality: each provider has different identities, policies, APIs, logs, service limits, responsibility boundaries, and failure modes.

The objective is consistent security intent with provider-aware implementation, not identical controls. Organizations need an inventory, accountable owners, common data and identity governance, and protected cross-cloud trust, network, API, data, and delivery paths.

### Key points

- **Governance and inventory:** Record providers, accounts, services, regions, owners, data, dependencies, administrative identities, contracts, and approved connections; include unsanctioned and inherited services in discovery.
- **Policy and evidence:** Define common outcomes, implement them through provider-specific controls, normalize only the telemetry needed for review and response, and test whether equivalent-looking settings behave equivalently.
- **Resilience and portability:** Assess common identity, DNS, code, key, network, and monitoring dependencies; rehearse provider and integration failures; and verify that data, configurations, and recovery materials can be exported and restored.
- **Important limitation:** Using several providers does not automatically reduce concentration risk or create portability. A shared identity provider, deployment pipeline, library, telecom path, or security platform can still fail across clouds. Least-common-denominator policy may also discard stronger native protections while presenting an appearance of consistency.

### Related terms

[Hybrid cloud security](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/hybrid-cloud-security/>) · [Cloud security architecture](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/cloud-security-architecture/>) · [Cloud security posture management (CSPM)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/cloud-security-posture-management/>) · [Cloud network security](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/cloud-network-security/>) · [Cloud security](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/cloud-security/>)

### Sources

[NIST SP 800-207A: Zero Trust Access Control in Multi-Cloud Applications](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/207/a/final) · [NIST IR 8505: Data Protection for Cloud-Native Applications](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/ir/8505/final) · [NIST Multi-Cloud Security Public Working Group](https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/mcspwg)

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