More and more organizations are now entrusting their IT resources and processing to the cloud. This trend is likely to grow in the coming years. To illustrate, Gartner predicts that cloud data centers will process 92 percent of workloads by 2020. Cloud workloads are expected to increase 3.2 times in that same span of time, Cisco forecasts.

With migration on their minds, many organizations are beginning to wake up to the security challenges of hosting their data in the cloud. Some might be struggling to identify who’s responsible for their cloud security under the shared responsibility model with their chosen cloud service provider (CSP). Others might be looking to OneLogin and worry about falling victim to a breach that compromises their cloud-based data, not to mention succumbing to other threats that jeopardize their cloud security.

These concerns are all valid. But while cloud security does have its challenges, it’s not impossible to figure out.

Australian web security expert Troy Hunt recommends that organizations begin by not thinking about cloud security in a binary mode. He recommends adopting a conceptualization that involves “differently secure” aspects of the cloud as opposed to elements that are “secure” or not. The same goes for securing the cloud versus securing physical hardware and datacenters.

“On the one hand, you may hand over physical control, but on the other hand, you’re almost certainly doing so to an organization better-equipped to manage computing environments than your own,” Hunt observes. “Then there are concerns around the increased attack surface of putting services in the cloud, but there’s great things that can be done with virtualized networks and access to features that were previously cost-prohibitive for many organizations (WAFs, HSMs, etc.). So think of the cloud as ‘different’ and make the most of those hybrid scenarios where (Read more...)