Philippe Courtot: Cloud Computing Growing Pains

Philippe Courtot, CEO of Qualys, founder member of the Cloud Security Alliance and Jericho Forum member talks about the growing pains of the Cloud. Is there too much cloud hype and what should organisations be looking to do with this technology? Some insights from the videocast are listed below. The inconvenient truth in security is that securing the data within an organisation is almost impossible because the location of more than 50% of data is often unknown ie it could be on USB stick, CD, backup, servers, desktops, email and so on. By having the data in the Cloud, people know where the data is and it is easily accessible no matter where people are located. Today it is possible to have a mainframe on every desktop by using Cloud computing power.. The Cloud is a very disruptive technology which is going to change a lot of the ways in which people run their businesses in the same way that the internet impacted on business processes. In fact the Cloud is just one aspect of the evolution of the internet. The challenges of working in the Cloud, are the contractual, legal, compliance and storage issues. Security professional jobs are going to be less technical and more strategic. For example, their decisions will become more about which Cloud providers to use, how to make data available to employees worldwide when their are restrictions on data location rather than how many servers to buy, what applications to run on them and how to have a layered defence model to protect their physical and logical assets. As less and less computing structure is required, IT departments will shrink and the role of the CIO and CISO will merge. As the Cloud evolves, security vendors will need to change their business models to answer the security needs of the cloud providers rather than the enterprise. Thank you for listening to this videocast. Please do leave comments and ratings to let us know if you would like more of the same. warmest wishes Ben Chai Chief Editor www.securityvibes.com/uk Videocast References Qualys – www.qualys.com mckinsey report on Cloud Computing uptimeinstitute.org ISF (information Security Forum) report from www.securityforum.org CSA report – www.cloudsecurityalliance.org Jericho Forum Cloud Cube Model www.opengroup.org/jericho/cloud_cube_model_v1.0.pdf