As enterprises expand globally, compliance with regional and global privacy laws has become critical. Data sovereignty is a top priority for today’s cloud-native enterprises, and will continue to shape how companies handle their customer data across multiple cloud platforms. Compliance challenges are often exacerbated by tight deadlines to complete cloud-to-cloud migrations, with businesses having months or weeks to complete a task which previously took 18 months or more. Traditionally, meeting compliance deadlines involved manual-time consuming processes that could stretch out across multiple years. Often, this work requires tedious manual data-entry, lengthy paper-based audit trails and recordkeeping, data aggregation, and inefficient, time-consuming review processes full of bottlenecks and delays if paperwork is not completed correctly.
Taking a traditional approach to cloud deployments is also a slow and error-prone process. Manually provisioning cloud environments across multiple regions grows increasingly complex as teams and companies grow, often adding to technical debt and leading to misconfigurations. Manual provisioning of cloud environments also decreases agility, impacting time-to-market and if over-provisioned or deployed in a different region, this can lead to costly cloud provider bills. Industries where compliance is regulated by law (e.g.; financial services, healthcare, data analytics communities) are impacted even more so by compliance issues, as mishandling customer data across multiple cloud environments each applicable to that region’s laws (such as GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Law, or Japan’s Act on the Protection of Personal Information) could lead to severe financial penalties.
With the right platform, multi-region expansion and compliance for cloud infrastructure doesn’t need to be a painful, manual process. StackGen allows enterprises to automate the provisioning of their cloud environments by using pre-defined templates and IaC best practices; businesses can quickly deploy standardized cloud environments across regions. By integrating policy enforcement and compliance checks directly into the cloud provisioning process, businesses can ensure that each region meets regulatory requirements from the outset.
Automation helps ensure that cloud environments remain consistent, reducing human error and making it easier to manage multiple deployments simultaneously. This also increases speed to compliance. Instead of taking six months or more to manually provision a single region, StackGen helps enterprises meet their compliance requirements in weeks by automating much of the process and accelerating deployment timelines. StackGen also helps companies ensure that their cloud environments meet the same compliance requirements across all regions, eliminating the risk of discrepancies that could lead to audits, compliance failures, or security vulnerabilities.
Instead of taking six months to provision a region manually, automation can drastically speed up the process. This enables enterprises to deploy cloud environments in parallel to better meet their deadlines for regional compliance. In cases where businesses need to deploy to multiple regions (e.g., 18 regions in 18 months), tools such as StackGen allow for faster provisioning, testing, and deployment, ensuring these deadlines are met without compromising on compliance and data privacy measures.
In today’s rapidly evolving cloud-native landscape, one of the significant benefits of automation is reduced time-to-market. Automating cloud provisioning results in dramatically reduced deployment times. The impact for businesses that once took 6-12 months to manually deploy each cloud region, now completing the task in a fraction of the time, is enormous. Automation also enables developers to be more efficient and focus on higher-priority tasks. By implementing IaC tooling and best practices, teams can reduce the need for manual intervention, reducing their Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), Change Failure Rate (CFR), and other valuable metrics.
Automating repetitive infrastructure management tasks frees developers to focus on application development, reduces technical debt, and allows time for innovation that may have previously been spent debugging failing pipelines, diagramming architecture relationships, and manually configuring complex multi-cloud environments. As businesses continue to grow and expand into new regions, automated cloud compliance and IaC provisioning tools can scale with them. Whether you’re adding new regions or adjusting to ever-changing compliance requirements, IaC automation ensures that each deployment is consistent, repeatable, and compliant. As cloud environments evolve, so too must the compliance standards they adhere to. Cloud automation and Iac tooling can be continuously updated to reflect changes in regulations, ensuring businesses remain compliant without spending too much time on manual updates and interventions.
For enterprises with existing cloud infrastructure, reverse engineering allows them to analyze their current setup and create reusable templates. By closely examining their infrastructure configurations, teams can generate modular, standardized ‘lego block’ style templates to quickly spin up new environments in different regions. Alternatively, forward-engineering involves designing high-level resource requirements for cloud environments, then generating the necessary IaC templates to deploy those environments. This methodology ensures that regions are set up and configured according to business needs, security requirements, and compliance goals from the start.
There’s no set standard on which approach is best, and both have their benefits. Reverse engineering works well for businesses looking to replicate their existing environments that have already established their best practices and configurations, while forward engineering provides more flexibility and control for organizations looking to scale their processes in the future.
Automation provides the tools enterprises need to meet the challenges of regulatory compliance and multi-region cloud provisioning head-on. By implementing generative IaC platforms such as StackGen, businesses can provision cloud environments faster, ensure consistency, and reduce their risk of compliance issues. With the shift towards automated cloud infrastructure, enterprises can focus on innovation and growing their business, knowing that their infrastructure is compliant, repeatable, and secure.
If you’re struggling to meet tight cloud region compliance deadlines, book a demo today to explore how StackGen can help your enterprise scale and comply faster than ever before.