Is the cloud secure?
Security plays an important role in cloud technology and providers take it extremely seriously. Their business depends on it. Plus, there are many regulatory bodies and compliance requirements from industries of all kinds driving the need for the cloud to be both as accessible as possible, while also being as secure as possible.
The fact is that the data stored in the cloud is probably safer than data on your hard drive. But this doesn’t mean companies and people shouldn’t be vigilant. Providers have robust methods of securing the cloud and they keep a laser focus on encryption and cloud security. Users of the cloud, however, need to be responsible for application security and securing the environment they create.
There are a few key things companies can do to minimize cloud security risks. Jonathan Roz, Managing Director, Accenture Cloud & Security, recommends taking these steps to become secure from the start:
Define new security policies and procedures. The procedures you have already most likely don’t address cloud infrastructure.
Configure to the appropriate framework. Make sure the cloud environment is automated and configured in a way that’s compliant with the security framework relevant to industry and country regulations.
Identify the relevant controls needed to monitor policies and procedures to make sure they are compliant on an ongoing basis.
Create a cloud-specific security reference architecture. This is critical because securing cloud environments is substantially different from securing on-premises environments—including tools, processes, and even skill requirements.
Move to a DevSecOps model where infrastructure gets treated like application code and gets scanned before being deployed to check for misconfigurations or non-compliance.
A one-size-fits-all approach isn’t the answer to cloud security. But with the many tools and practices now available, security shouldn’t provide an obstacle to effective cloud migration and management.
A one-size-fits-all approach isn’t the answer to cloud security. But with the many tools and practices now available, security shouldn’t provide an obstacle to effective cloud migration and management.
Future of cloud
At the beginning of 2020, as the COVID-19 crisis unfolded, businesses began to accelerate their digital transformations to cloud to help navigate the human and business impact. It is clear that working from home and business continuity have been made possible by cloud computing.
The importance of cloud technology is even more apparent when we look at the performance gap that already exists between enterprise technology leaders and laggards. Almost overnight, the gap has widened. Leaders who invested in cloud technology as part of their digital transformation journeys have been able to adjust their supply chains and ways of buying at speed. They carry less fixed IT costs, making it possible to cut expenses far quicker than laggards who have been slow to migrate to the cloud. These laggards are now aggressively partnering to re-focus, control costs and catch up.
What happens next?
The crisis is still evolving. The rules of business are changing and the scale of uncertainty is without a doubt, at times, overwhelming. Slowly, around the world, businesses are reopening. As they do, they’re realizing that the way to outmaneuver uncertainty is through reinvention and a new view on how to both provide and achieve new value.
This reinvention presents an opportunity. Now is the time for organizations to build and expand the capabilities they wish they’d invested in before the crisis. The agility and flexibility that cloud technology enables means opening up new ways of working, operating, and doing business.
