Speeding the Secure Cloud Adoption Process

By Vinay Patel, Chair, CSA Global Enterprise Advisory Board, and Managing Director, Citigroup

Innovators and early adopters have been using cloud for years, taking advantage of the quicker deployment, greater scalability, and cost saving of services. The growth of cloud computing continues to accelerate, offering more solutions with added features and benefits, and with proper implementation, enhanced security. In the age of information digitalization and innovation, enterprise users must keep pace with consumer demand and new technology solutions ensuring they can meet both baseline capabilities and security requirements.

CSA’s new report, c This free resource provides a roadmap to developing best practices where providers, regulators, and the enterprise can come together in the establishment of baseline security requirements needed to protect organizational data.

The report, authored by the CSA Global Enterprise Advisory Board, examines such areas as the adoption of cloud and related technologies, what both enterprises and cloud providers are doing to ensure security requirements are met, how to best work with regulators, the evolving threat landscape, and goes on to touch upon the industry skills gap.

Among the report’s key takeaways are:

• Exploration of case studies and potential use cases for blockchain, application containers, microservices and other technologies will be important to keep pace with market adoption and the creation of secure industry best practices.
• With the rapid introduction of new features, safe default configurations and ensuring the proper use of features by enterprises should be a goal for providers.
• As adversaries collaborate quickly, the information security community needs to respond to attacks swiftly with collaborative threat intelligence exchanges that include both providers and enterprise end users.
• A staged approach on migrating sensitive data and critical applications to the cloud is recommended.
• When meeting regulatory compliance, it is important for enterprises to practice strong security fundamentals to demonstrate compliance rather than use compliance to drive security requirements.

Understanding the use of cloud and related technologies will help in brokering the procurement and management of these services while maintaining proper responsibility of data security and ownership. Education and awareness still needs to improve around provider services and new technologies for the enterprise. Small-scale adoption projects need to be shared so that security challenges and patterns can be adopted to scale with the business and across industry verticals. This skills gap, particularly around cloud and newer IT technologies, needs to be met by the industry through partnership and collaboration between all parties of the cyber ecosystem.

The state of cloud security is a work in progress with an ever-increasing variety of challenges and potential solutions. It is incumbent upon the cloud user community, therefore, to collaborate and speak with an amplified voice to ensure that their key security issues are heard and addressed.

Download the full report.