INTRODUCTION
The future of business and IT lies in the cloud, but will such a future irreversibly compromise our standards of data security and privacy? Far from it. Contrary to popular belief, cloud and public data centers can be as secure as on-premise infrastructure – if not more so. But with 92% of global IT workloads expected to live in cloud data centers by 2020, 1the frequency and diversity of cyber-at- tacks on data centers will only increase.
Business leaders cannot take the security of their clouds and data centers for granted. With the majority of IT workloads set to be processed in the public cloud,2IT managers will have less and less hands-on control of their security than they used to. And the costs of a successful breach – an average of $4 million in 20163 – can cripple even organizations with strong profits and reputation with their customers.
A cloud-first world demands a new approach to security from IT leaders. They must learn to be discerning when selecting from the growing range of cybersecurity services in the market. They need an awareness of which threats pose the greatest risks to their organizations, what cloud service providers (CSPs) bear responsibility for, and where to find – and eliminate – the most common vulnerabilities in any data center. Rather than fixing the technical issues themselves, their role will increasingly be that of risk management: collaborating with CSPs and using the latest technologies to identify threats even before they can strike the data center.
This whitepaper looks at
•The greatest cybersecurity risks that organizations face in a cloud-first world;
•The (surprisingly broad) security options available to them in the cloud;
•Steps to protect their data center infrastructure with a multilayered, automated approach to security.
IT leaders can trust the cloud for security – and they must. With the right foresight and a strategic choice of service providers, businesses of all industries can ensure that the cloud not only unlocks their full potential for global growth, but also makes their organizations and data more secure than ever before.
