siliconindia | | June 20178IN MY OPINIONRealizing EfficienciesOne of the fastest growing trends in the digital world, cloud computing, is proving to be an efficient and cost-ef-fective tool that companies are using to stay relative and competitive. The cloud is a network of servers that al-lows businesses to provide services and applications in a fast, available, flexible and scalable manner. Businesses are utilizing cloud-first strategies to avoid having to fi-nancially invest in owning and operating the costly hard-ware like servers that are required to offer services to their customers. Staying CompetitiveAccording to research by Gartner, by 2020 the shift in IT spending from traditional hardware and software to cloud computing will affect more than $1 trillion in IT spending world-wide. Not embracing the cloud is becoming a com-petitive disadvantage for companies, regardless of their industry. According to Nomura research, in the next few years, organizations plan to have more than 50 percent of their applications based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud model. SaaS is a web-based software dis-tribution model in which a third-party provider centrally hosts applications and makes them available to customers. Currently, 30 percent of organizations have SaaS-based applications. If a business isn't already using the cloud as part of its strategy, they are already behind the trend. Customizing Cloud TechnologyThere are multiple ways to take advantage of cloud tech-nology and choosing the right one will depend on what issues a business is trying to solve. The deployment mod-el consists of the private, public and hybrid cloud. The public cloud can be an economical option for testing and development, while the private cloud makes it possible for businesses to meet certain security and compliance requirements while leveraging virtualization. The hybrid cloud option can refer to the combination of physical and virtual environments or the combination of private and public cloud options. The service model refers to Infra-structure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).SecurityThe trick to taking advantage of the benefits of cloud in-tegration is maintaining a pre-defined risk posture, which consists of security policies, procedures and controls that a business has to protect it from threats. According to re-search by Nomura, the top two drivers of company spend-ing are security and cloud computing. Cloud security con-BUILD A STRATEGY TO SECURELY OPERATE IN A CLOUD-FIRST WORLDBy Robert LaMagna-Reiter, Sr. Director - Information Security, First National Technology SolutionsHeadquartered in Omaha, U.S., First National Technology Solutions (FNTS) provides enterprise hosted remote managed services and cloud solutions for Windows, i/OS, z/OS, AIX and Linux operating systems, and specializes in Flash Storage, Cloud Computing, Disaster Recovery, Backup Services, Public & Private Cloud, and many others.
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