September - 2013 - issue > View Point
Cloud Security: The Next Frontier
Nishant Doshi
CEO-CirroScope Inc.
As more and more businesses move petabytes of data to the cloud, security becomes an important conversation. With mounting pressures to go “all cloud”, IT organizations have a serious task ahead of them. This task involves providing an ever-increasing number of cloud-based applications to their employees while maintaining visibility and control across provisioned applications.
A few years back all the data resided on-premise, making it relatively easy to govern and control. With the move to the cloud, understanding the data stored in these applications and who has access to it, has become the million-dollar question. Although cloud applications spend significant resources securing their own infrastructure, they pay no attention to securing the weakest link: the end users of their systems. Most cloud applications have no security policy engine and do not deliver actionable security alerts.
Cloud applications make it very easy to share data outside the organization. On average, for a given business using SaaS based file collaboration services, five percent of all their files and folders can be accessed by a public link by anyone on the Internet. Imagine if one of those files accidentally contained sensitive information or even proprietary source code. It could be devastating for the company.
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