According to many experts, including those from the Technology Marketing Forum, Gartner Group and Information Week, the No. 1 issue holding back the adoption of cloud technologies in the enterprise is the perception of a lack of security.
IT professionals envision environments where cyber criminals freely roam the network like trolls picking away morsels of valuable information. Others claim that the cloud is a perfectly safe place to store your information or conduct financial transactions. Like many issues, the truth is probably in between.
“It is not the cloud that is more or less secure — the entire industry is morphing into a new paradigm,” says Mark Swanson, the CEO of cloud communications provider, Telovations, Inc., headquartered in Tampa, Fla.
Smart Business spoke with Swanson, who also has experience in the IT security field, about cloud computing and how to ensure that your cloud solution is safe and secure.
What do you mean when you say the industry is morphing into a new paradigm?
The old paradigm was creating a secure perimeter — a border, so to speak — to protect your corporate information assets. The new paradigm is what Cisco has labeled ‘borderless networks’ — networks where most, if not all, of your corporate resources must be exposed to the outside world. The old security model is dependent on ‘border patrol’ via firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, demilitarized zones (DMZs), and other perimeter protection methods. In the new, borderless network, the focus shifts to protection of the data itself.
What is the driving force behind these ‘borderless networks’?
If you look at what’s happened in the last five years, you can see that corporate networks are going away — they are undergoing a ‘de-perimeterization.’ Technical capabilities have basically outpaced the old perimeter model as online collaboration with partners, customers, mobile workers and others outside the physical network becomes more and more important to doing business. The workforce is demanding that they be connected to data resources wherever they are (private or public cloud), using an ever-widening variety of devices: smartphones, notebook computers, tablets and so on. This is great in terms of access to resources, but not so great in terms of security.
