Given the huge breaches suffered by major companies over the past year, one could be forgiven for asking if there can ever really be a secure cloud.
The answer, according to one speaker at Structure:Europe, is no, not really. But, then again, no one really cares. “If you look at breaches at major companies like Google, LinkedIn and Sony — no real harm resulted,” said GigaOM PRO analyst Greg Ferro. “Every time Sony gets breached its share price goes up. RSA a few years ago got owned by some offshore hackers and now customers see RSA as a better provider because they got hacked,” Ferro noted.
A panel of vendor security execs didn’t necessarily agree with that contention but noted it is their job to bake better — and less painful — security into all levels of their clouds. It is no longer enough to slap a firewall up and claim victory because this battle has evolved from old-time trench warfare to a battle without front lines, said Joe Baguley, CTO of EMEA for VMware.
The bottom line is if security procedures are painful and slow down the process, people will circumvent them. Apple put fingerprint recognition on the iPhone 5S because people weren’t protecting their phones, Baguley said.
Cloud vendors are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to security because customers want to know what they’re doing to protect data and applications, but sharing too much of that impairs security.
Adrienne Hall, Microsoft’s GM of Trustworthy Computing, said there are broad “themes” that cloud providers can share with enterprise customers. Customers should be able to ask what the vendor is doing at the design phase and the deployment phase to protect cloud services.
“If the cloud provider can’t answer those question, it’s cause for concern,” she said.
Check out the rest of our Structure:Europe 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities
- Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
- Microsoft Azure: What It Is, What It Costs and Who Should Care