Introduction
The cloud will be a growing part of your IT environment. This is inevitable, particularly in consideration of the following:
▪ Economic Attractiveness – The economic attractiveness of cloud infrastructure services (e.g., Infrastructure as a Service – IaaS) is rising with each round of price wars. Lured by this attractiveness, will your organization be faced with escalating data protection, operational risk, management complexity, and compliance uncertainty?
▪ Self-Service Proclivity – Findings from a late-2013 Frost & Sullivan survey show that 70 percent of end users are ignoring IT approval procedures and subscribing to un-vetted cloud services, for a variety of reasons: support business objectives, improve productivity, and foster innovation. Can your organization mitigate the security risks associated with uncontrolled and invisible use of Software as a Service (SaaS)?
▪ Opportunities in the Internet of Things – The eve of the Internet of Things is here, as the ability to send and collect burgeoning streams of data is no longer technologically constrained. Similarly, producing actionable insights from this data mountain is no longer “on the horizon,” but aided by the elasticity of the cloud. Readying your organization to skillfully ride the twin waves of the Internet of Things and Big Data & Analytics cannot wait—but are you prepared to tackle the information security challenges that arise when the cloud is part of the equation?
Addressing these questions is feasible through proactive and sensible risk management. While information technology does move rapidly and with a degree of unpredictability, a comprehensive risk management approach, designed to flex and adapt, enables organizations to embrace cloud services with security confidence.
In this paper, we present a straightforward approach to cloud security. The structural foundation of this approach will not only assist in mitigating the risks associated with cloud deployments and usage, but also improve and standardize your security posture and practices across all your environments—public and private clouds as well as bare metal server clouds; and allow you to skip future security overhauls brought on by the emergence of new types of information technologies and security threats.
View the full document here: Best Practice Security in a Cloud-Enabled World
