Multicloud security automation is essential — but no silver bullet

Multicloud architectures are becoming more common across enterprises, as they enable IT leaders to strategically choose best-of-breed services from multiple providers. But with flexibility comes greater complexity, and security challenges can compound quickly. Cloud providers differ in how they handle access controls, encryption, and compliance. Native tools and security services also evolve constantly, sometimes without notice.

For CISOs, security architects, and engineers, automated tools are the only way to keep pace in a multicloud environment. But automation is no silver bullet, security practitioners say. It works only when implemented deliberately, monitored continuously, and guided by human judgment.

Here is a look at how automation can help cyber teams address the unique challenges of securing multicloud environments.

Why multicloud automation is a must

Multicloud security wasn’t supposed to be this hard. “Let’s start by understanding that ‘multicloud’ is a term that originally meant ‘have portable workloads that you can easily load-balance across multiple clouds,’” says Andy Ellis, partner at YL Ventures and former CSO at Akamai.

“Ideally, this would have prevented vendor lock-in and allowed cloud security to be easily separable into workload security, where you’d worry about how you’d architected your workload, and infrastructure security, where you’d focus on getting the details right in your configuration and implementation,” Ellis says.

That vision held clear appeal for the C-suite — it “was very popular among CISOs, who loved the security implications, and CFOs, who adored the idea of making cloud providers bid each other down,” Ellis says. “But it never really caught on with engineers, who wanted to adopt the latest and coolest features developed by the cloud providers — who absolutely wanted customers to adopt sticky features that were incompatible across environments.”

The result: “‘Multicloud’ came to mean ‘different parts of your organization use different clouds,’ and CISOs and their teams are left trying to implement security across a diverse ecosystem,” Ellis says.

Such a heterogenous architecture caused complexity to pile up for those charged with securing it. “Every cloud provider speaks its own ‘dialect’ — different APIs, rules, and interpretations of shared responsibility,” says Vinod Goje, a data-driven solutions and applied AI expert. “It’s like juggling three different operating manuals for the same mission.”

Ellis agrees: “The first challenge that security teams face is that various cloud providers have different fundamental security capabilities.”

Take access control, Ellis says. “One provider’s role-based access control deals with system roles but not user roles, while another one focuses on user roles, with only slight lip service to system roles — and that’s even assuming that they have the same capabilities.

“Even within one cloud provider, different services may support wildly divergent security capabilities,” he says.

Inconsistencies such as these create gaps that security teams must address, says Erich Barlow, head of information security for the Americas at BSI.

“For example, one vendor might have a different method of data encryption or identity management method than another, leading to potential weak points that attackers can exploit,” Barlow says.

Patching and updating systems in a multicloud environment is another pain point, Barlow says, “because it requires coordinating with multiple service providers with different schedules and procedures for rolling out updates. This situation can delay critical security updates, leaving systems vulnerable for longer periods.”

That’s where security automation comes in — not as a luxury, but as a necessity.

“I consider automated tools as the cornerstone of modern foundational capabilities,” says Randy Armknecht, managing director at Protiviti. “Indicators of a need for greater automation include increased mean-time-to-remediate metrics, security staff burnout, and inconsistent responses to similar incidents across environments.”

For Armknecht, the goal isn’t just efficiency — it’s transformation.

“The fundamental responsibility of the role is to create an environment where security acts as a business enabler rather than a roadblock,” he says. “Implementing comprehensive and thoughtful controls, combined with the efficiency of automation, provides consistent risk mitigation needed for rapid innovation,” he says. Used properly, “automation and observability enhance security posture, reduce cloud waste, and drive team efficiency.”

Defining multicloud automation strategies

As an engineering leader, how should you approach implementing security automation in a multicloud environment? The experts we spoke to emphasized intentional design, layered planning, and a commitment to continual refinement.

“I like to consider the planning process in terms of layers,” says Protiviti’s Armknecht. “The foundational layer involves achieving observability across the multicloud environment. Next, we align with a unified security framework to ensure policy consistency across various platforms, avoiding different standards for AWS, GCP, and Azure. Finally, we establish processes to respond to deviations from the standard, which may include prevention, alerting, or automatic remediation.” These layers help build a resilient architecture that balances proactive monitoring with structured response mechanisms.

Observability is foundational not just for the systems themselves, but also for the humans managing them. Drew Firment, chief cloud strategist at Pluralsight, emphasized the importance of visibility. “Organizations need to first prioritize investment in security tools that help monitor and manage data across the cloud, giving employees visibility into what is happening within the cloud environments,” he says.

But visibility can’t stop at the surface. Automation introduces complexity of its own, and teams need insight into how automated tools are operating. “Organizations need to develop robust frameworks to monitor and control automated tools,” says BSI’s Barlow. “This involves setting transparent processes and protocols for when human intervention is necessary and ensuring that automated tools are aligned with the overall security strategy.” Barlow also stresses the need for regular audits of automated systems, so their efficacy can be evaluated and adjusted over time.

That iterative mindset is essential. “The complexity of security policy is such that organizations will find it impossible to go from zero to ‘good enough’ in one fell swoop,” says YL Ventures’ Ellis. “Security automation needs to track progress in a meaningful way: Understanding the currently intended policies and changes, driving improvements in those areas, while not saturating organizations with alerts about deviations for (not-implemented) policies.” In other words, automation should reflect where an organization is in its maturity curve, not where it aspires to be someday.

These iterations are often necessary because the underlying cloud platforms that your tools will be monitoring change — sometimes without customers being aware of it.

“Cloud providers also sometimes update their existing native tools, and companies need to both detect that these changes have happened and then update their usage of the tools to be consistent with the changes,” Ellis says.

“These changes are not only driven by new features, but also as cloud providers ‘fix’ insecure implementations by silently updating features. Past integrations may no longer meet best practices — not because the cloud team ‘did it wrong,’ but because the tools themselves now work better than they did — and automation needs to understand how to reimplement security practices,” he says.

For that reason, AI expert Goje recommends conducting regular “security calibration” sessions. “It’s a chance to step back and reassess how automation is behaving, especially as cloud services evolve,” he says. “The truth is, there’s no magic button for multicloud security. Until AIOps matures enough to truly simplify things, the best bet is a thoughtful, hybrid model pairing automation with human judgment.”

The human touch

In fact, security experts agree that even when extensive security automation is used in multicloud architectures humans need to remain in the mix.

As Goje says, “I’ve seen teams lean too far into [automation], only to have their SOAR platforms mistakenly isolate critical workloads because of a false positive. When that happens, business takes a hit. And automated compliance tools? They can trigger a flood of alerts — many of them irrelevant — leaving analysts buried in noise instead of focused on actual threats.”

Even the most advanced tools, like CSPM platforms, require humans in the loop to add context. “The smarter approach I’ve seen work is balance,” Goje says. “AI-powered tools like CSPM are incredibly helpful, but they shine brightest when analysts are still in the loop adding context and gut-checking the decisions that automation makes. That human touch still matters.”

Standardizing security policy across multicloud environments introduces even more complexity. “Let’s say that a security team manages to address the problem of different primitives and now wants to standardize policy across its various cloud environments,” says YL Ventures’ Ellis.

“As various clouds are owned by various teams, this isn’t as simple as having automation that ‘makes it so.’ Each suborganization will have a different SLA for how those changes go out, from ‘just push them out for us’ to ‘run this through a change management board.’ A security team has to be flexible in how they implement changes, and their automation needs to understand and accommodate those differences,” he says.

Humans are also needed for dealing with organizational diversity and corporate politics. “Different teams with different needs cause problems that security can’t just solve,” Ellis says. “A security team has to convince humans — themselves and their auditors — that their security controls are actually effective and meet their needs. So, it isn’t sufficient to merely automate everything. Security teams need to be able to translate detailed technical implementations into human-readable, control-oriented language that addresses how those controls achieve the objectives of various compliance regimes.”

That’s why investment in people remains central to security strategy. “Organizations then need to provide employees with the proper training on mastering one cloud and how to easily spot security threats so they can provide solutions before vulnerabilities turn into a crisis,” says Pluralsight’s Firment. “After they master one cloud provider, employees and organizations will have a much easier time managing multicloud environments.”

Multicloud security automation isn’t a magic fix — it’s a discipline. Tools can help you scale and streamline security efforts, but only if paired with layered planning, rigorous visibility, and empowered teams. Automation must be built to flex around organizational realities, and it needs people who can guide it, tune it, and make sense of it. That’s why the best security programs don’t just buy automation — they invest in the humans who make it work.

Protiviti’s Armknecht puts it simply: “Investing in the team’s continuous technical education to stay ahead of evolving threats and empowering them to drive meaningful change based on daily operations is crucial.”