How are Organizations Doing with Cloud?
Enterprises continue to flock to the cloud, anxious to eliminate huge capital expenses in data centers — but should we demand more from cloud providers?
It’s no secret that cloud services providers are prime targets for hackers, and that they can also make mistakes that invite security breaches and data theft.
In 2020, disgruntled Amazon employees released a number of Amazon customer email addresses to third parties. In 2021, Microsoft warned thousands of its Azure cloud computing customers about a vulnerability that left their data completely exposed for the last two years.
Many cloud providers include disclaimers in their contracts for any data loss that clients might experience. If you are a small or mid-sized company, you don’t have much leverage to renegotiate these boilerplate provisions, so you are left in a position of both trusting the cloud provider and hoping that your data isn’t exposed.
It wasn’t that long ago that a public cloud provider shared with me that cloud services platforms were notorious for shortcutting on security and governance practices. So where does that leave their clients?
One step cloud users can take is to ensure that their own liability insurance covers a data breach incident on the cloud. Another step is to thoroughly review a cloud provider’s guarantees on security and governance before entering into any contract. A third step is to play a more active role in managing and enforcing your own security and governance over your IT assets in the cloud.
All of these steps assist in bullet-proofing cloud users from the cloud security breaches that could occur in the future.
The message for cloud providers is to improve their security and governance practices so clients can feel more comfortable.
The complexity of cloud pricing models can make CIOs long for the days of the internal data center with its fixed, discretionary and amortized costs.
Jonathan Shanks, CEO and co-founder of Kubernetes delivery platform Appvia, discusses a cloud scenario in which four separate cloud platforms, each with its own pricing structure, were engaged.
“Let’s take a look at AWS Lambda as an example,” said Shanks. “Imagine you have a web application using the CloudFront CDN [content delivery network]. When a user interacts with the application it triggers a HTTP request through an API gateway that invokes a Lambda function that takes in the data and stores it in DynamoDB.
The requirement here seems quite straightforward.
