As we head into 2020, there’s little doubt that the organizations across the globe and the US Federal government has become increasingly reliant upon the public cloud as a core component of digital transformation. The recent award of the controversial Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract is but one example. IDC predicts that 49% of the world’s stored data will reside in the public cloud by 2025. The United States has had a “Cloud First” policy since 2011, which recently evolved into a “Cloud Smart” policy.
Increased use of public cloud services will provide government agencies with greater flexibility and scalability options, with a dark twist: Attackers will have an increasingly attractive bullseye to target. Expect to see more breaches in 2020 as cloud applications become more ubiquitous.
So, if the federal government is putting such an emphasis on being Cloud Smart, why are so many agencies still acting so “cloud dumb”? Why are they not doing more to protect their data?
Let’s look at three strategies agencies can adopt to get smarter about public cloud security.
Protect the Data
The first thing executives need to understand is that the cloud providers aren’t responsible for protecting data. That falls under the purview of the organizations that are using the cloud infrastructure.
For example, Amazon Web Services’ Shared Responsibility Model clearly states that “AWS is responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs all of the services offered in the AWS cloud,” while “customers are responsible for managing their data.” This includes managing encryption methods, monitoring user access to data, m ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
