Why Security Pros Need To Embrace The Cloud

Technology futurists predict that your entire data center could wind up in the cloud.

- Jeffrey W. Brown, Chief Security and Information Risk Officer, BNY Mellon

This isn’t a distant vision or far off future state, either. In fact, some big companies, like Netflix, are already there. Gartner claims that by 2020, a corporate “nocloud” policy will be as rare as a “no-Internet” policy is today. They see companies moving from a “cloud first” strategy to a “cloud only” strategy in the short term. Even the financial industry regulatory authority (FINRA) uses the cloud to analyze some 75 billion trades daily. A financial regulator in the cloud? Is it time for security professionals to panic? Not so fast.

There have been a number of high-profile incidents from clients of cloud services recently, which gives the naysayers plenty of material to feed their view on why the cloud should be avoided. Booz Allen, Viacom, Verizon, some very big name companies have all had issues. Yet when we look at why these issues happened, the theme was more around configuration management than around a fundamentally flawed platform. Still, the number one barrier cited to cloud deployment is security concerns. It should probably be poor IT hygiene.