A Standardized Multi-Cloud Governance Model for Policy Consistency and Drift Detection

Abstract

The increasing adoption of multi-cloud architectures has introduced new challenges in governance, policy consistency, and configuration drift detection across heterogeneous cloud environments. Organizations commonly rely on providerspecific governance tools such as AWS Config, Azure Policy, and GCP Config Validator; however, these tools often operate independently, creating inconsistencies in enforcement, reporting, and compliance monitoring. This paper proposes a standardized multi-cloud governance model that introduces a centralized policy abstraction layer, a cross-cloud policy mapping mechanism, and a continuous drift detection pipeline. The framework is evaluated through a FinTech-oriented use case, demonstrating improvements in policy compliance consistency, drift visibility, operational efficiency, and reliability outcomes. The proposed approach provides a reusable model for organizations seeking unified governance, proactive drift detection, and improved compliance readiness across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments. Impact Statement-This work presents a practical and scalable framework for standardizing multi-cloud governance and detecting policy drift across distributed cloud environments. By integrating policy abstraction, cross-cloud mapping, observability, and remediation workflows, the proposed model supports improved reliability, compliance consistency, and operational efficiency.

Keywords: Multi-cloud governance, policy drift detection, cloud compliance, site reliability engineering, observability, AWS, Azure, GCP