The greatest governance challenge in the scenario where production is hosted in a public cloud and backups are held on-premises is aligning the shared responsibilities between the provider and the customer. This is because the division of security and compliance duties must be clearly understood and managed to ensure that all aspects of the cloud services are adequately protected and meet regulatory requirements. The customer is responsible for the security 'in' the cloud (i.e., the data and applications), while the provider is responsible for the security 'of' the cloud (i.e., the infrastructure). Misalignment in this shared responsibility model can lead to gaps in security and compliance, making it a significant governance challenge.
Reference = This answer is verified by the information available in the Cloud Auditing Knowledge (CCAK) documents and related resources provided by ISACA and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), which discuss the shared responsibility model and its implications for governance in cloud environments12.

Role-based access controls (RBAC) are a method of restricting access to resources based on the roles of individual users within an organization. RBAC allows administrators to assign permissions to roles, rather than to specific users, and then assign users to those roles. This simplifies the management of access rights and reduces the risk of unauthorized or excessive access. RBAC is especially important for ensuring adequate restriction on the number of people who can access the pipeline production environment, which is the final stage of the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) process where code is deployed to the end-users. Access to the production environment should be limited to only those who are responsible for deploying, monitoring, and maintaining the code, such as production engineers, release managers, or site reliability engineers. Developers, testers, or other stakeholders should not have access to the production environment, as this could compromise the security, quality, and performance of the code. RBAC can help enforce this separation of duties and responsibilities by defining different roles for different pipeline stages and granting appropriate permissions to each role. For example, developers may have permission to create, edit, and test code in the development pipeline, but not to deploy or modify code in the production pipeline. Conversely, production engineers may have permission to deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot code in the production pipeline, but not to create or edit code in the development pipeline. RBAC can also help implement the principle of least privilege, which states that users should only have the minimum level of access required to perform their tasks. This reduces the attack surface and minimizes the potential damage in case of a breach or misuse. RBAC can be configured at different levels of granularity, such as at the organization, project, or object level, depending on the needs and complexity of the organization. RBAC can also leverage existing identity and access management (IAM) solutions, such as Azure Active Directory or AWS IAM, to integrate with cloud services and applications.
Reference:
Set pipeline permissions - Azure Pipelines
Azure DevOps: Access, Roles and Permissions
Cloud Computing - What IT Auditors Should Really Know

A Type 1 SOC report assesses whether controls are appropriately designed at a specific point in time, while a Type 2 SOC report tests the operating effectiveness of these controls over a period. For cloud auditing, Type 2 is often preferred for its comprehensive approach to both design and effectiveness over time. The CCAK curriculum emphasizes understanding these reports as critical tools in auditing cloud service providers (referenced in the CCAK content on Assurance and Transparency and the CSA STAR framework).

Access controls are an assurance requirement when an organization is migrating to a SaaS provider because they ensure that only authorized users can access the cloud services and data. Access controls also help to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the cloud resources. Access controls are part of the Cloud Control Matrix (CCM) domain IAM-01: Identity and Access Management Policy and Procedures, which states that "The organization should have a policy and procedures to manage user identities and access to cloud services and data."1 Reference := CCAK Study Guide, Chapter 4: A Threat Analysis Methodology for Cloud Using CCM, page 751