Compliance and risk are critical factors impacting businesses today. Choosing a strong local cloud partner can position companies to reduce or even eliminate the many challenges posed by compliance and risk, says Lee Syse, Director Product & GTM at Routed.

Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) is a strategic framework that ensures IT activities align with business objectives, sustainability goals, and corporate integrity. Ultimately, it ensures that companies follow the rules and manage risks effectively. 

Although governance relates to your company processes and the need to have clear visibility into what's happening inside the business - and as such is very much an internal thing - risk and compliance are issues that your partners can provide crucial support.

There are, after all, numerous risks a company faces when it comes to ICT infrastructure implementations, and making the right choices here is key to mitigating these. Perhaps the single biggest risk organisations take is in choosing to operate their own ICT facilities. Despite the rise of the cloud, there remain many businesses that choose to operate their own servers or data centres, leaving them little in the way of protection in the case of a disaster.

Among the potential issues facing local companies that run their own facilities are the risks from loadshedding, natural disasters like fires or floods, and the risk of using aged equipment that has, as an asset, been sweated to the nth degree.

Choosing the right partner - one with a best-of-breed data centre - helps to address all these risks and more. This eliminates many of the cost elements that would impact one’s own facility, while giving clients access to a cloud solution with built-in redundancy.

Furthermore, a partner that operates at scale will be able to balance this risk, through the use of a tenancy model - essentially sharing both the cost and the risk across multiple customers. A partner whose core focus is on cloud delivery would also be in a position to reinvest in equipment before the infrastructure reaches its full lifespan, thereby eliminating the risk created by utilising obsolete equipment.

The importance of business continuity

Another risk that companies face is that of infrastructure business failure, which is why there is a requirement for a secondary site that will allow for business continuity.
Once again, for a company to invest in its own secondary site - one that will stand idle unless there is an emergency - in order to pass a risk audit can prove exceedingly costly.

An effective cloud partner, on the other hand, will be in a position to replicate your data to their cloud, recover your data in the case of an incident, and even generate an audit report at the end, to demonstrate that everything was successful.

A third area of risk that companies face is around a potential cyberattack, particularly the threat created by ransomware, and the need to recover your data in the event of such an attack.

The challenge with ransomware is that it may also encrypt your backup copies, if you run your own facility. However, leveraging the cloud means your partner provisions the backup for you, placing it behind a security gateway. This virtual private cloud will allow you to keep your critical data safe while you clean your systems of the ransomware. Once your systems are ready for use again, you can recover and move your data back to your first choice business systems.

It is vital, therefore, to choose a cloud partner that not only has vast expertise and experience when it comes to running infrastructure, but also follows industry best practices, while delivering a cost effective, enterprise-quality service.

It is important to ensure your partner provides additional options to further reduce your risk, such as owning and managing vendor contracts within their packaged service. Managing contracts can be extremely complex, as most businesses have multiple vendor contracts, any or all of which may change over the time-span of the agreement.

Remember that it only takes a single vendor to make a licensing change that impacts your entire commercial model, and you will quickly find your business in a bad situation. It is thus crucial to align with a partner that will manage and aggregate these contracts on your behalf.

Data sovereignty and compliance

From a GRC point of view, while risk is a key factor one should expect a cloud partner to assist with, this is not the only area of GRC such a partner should be able to help you with.

From the perspective of compliance, it is imperative to choose a partner that operates a local data centre, in order to ensure the sovereignty of your business data. Data sovereignty is the idea that data is subject to the laws and regulations of the country or region where such data originates.

Sovereignty actually speaks to risk and compliance, because in a situation in which data is generated and then transmitted and remotely processed, this data may be subject to the laws of both the nation it is resident in, and the laws of the country it was generated in.

To avoid this, one wants to keep the data sovereign by ensuring it is held and processed solely in a local data centre. This will allow clients to ensure they remain compliant with the laws of South Africa, while their partner abides by a sovereign architecture that will give them the comfort of knowing they need not fear the risk of data leakage to other countries.

Ultimately, when it comes to GRC, choosing the right partner is the best way to help mitigate risk and remain legally compliant. Partnering with a company like Routed will give your organisation access to the right solutions to suit your needs. More than this, it will provide the answers as to how your business can maintain the security and privacy of your data and digital resources, ensure compliance with regulatory and industry requirements, and protect your business continuity and cloud innovation.