Dare to Share in The Cloud: How Secure Is Your Data?

The march to the cloud for mission-critical applications is picking up speed. Even financial services firms, noted for their caution, are making headway. UK-based insurance intermediaryTowergate Insurance announced last year that it is moving its IT infrastructure to the cloud. And The Wall Street Journal reported in June 2016 that Deutsche Bank researchers are projecting that public cloud adoption of an infrastructure as a service model by big banks will grow from as little as 0% today to 30% within three years.

Despite this positively sunny outlook there are still some data security, privacy and governance hoops to jump through before betting your business on the public cloud.

It’s true that the major cloud providers do a great job on perimeter security, helping to alleviate enterprise concerns over traditional network and operational security in the cloud. However, cloud security is about far more than just securing the perimeter. Rather it is just the first step in a multi-layered strategy.

The data inside the public cloud environment needs to be secure too – and this is the responsibility of the data owner or custodian, not the cloud provider. Failure to secure the data itself makes large organisations far more likely to suffer a successful data breach and make the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

One of the major strengths of the cloud is its ability to let employees, customers, partners and suppliers – as well as your cloud provider’s operations team – access your network and services to conduct business. But you need to know who’s accessing the network at any point in time, ensure their access and editing rights are set correctly and be able to audit their actions. This requires an enterprise-hardened database, like enterprise NoSQL, which wraps layers of security right around the data and uses advanced encryption to mitigate the risk from both insider threats and external hackers.

Although the cloud makes it easier to share data – it also comes with some risks. The more the data is shared, the greater the risk of leakage. This is where data privacy and data governance considerations come in.

We come across lots of enterprises that have built massive data lakes at great expense only to find they are stymied because their data governance is below par.