Cloud Popularity Drives Increased Role for Risk Management

In recent years, the holiday season seems to bring about more than its fair share of reported cyber incidents and data breaches. In response, many organizations are using the annual budget review process to increase spending on IT security and the hiring of IT security professionals.

But, inevitably, individuals on the cyber-naughty list always seem to be one step ahead. That is especially true as more data moves to the cloud environment and organizations lose direct control of it. Cloud adoption continues to rise at a significant pace, with most mid-size and large organizations storing at least some of their data and applications in the cloud.

The increased popularity of the cloud adds to the vulnerability of corporate data, of course, and makes the job of risk analysis all the more important, warns Samson David, senior vice president and global head of cloud infrastructure services and security at Infosys.

Samson shared his predictions for the top cloud security trends next year with Information Management. Three top trends are:

Security vulnerabilities scale up

“It’s no secret that cyber threats are getting smarter and penetrating deeper across devices and different levels,” Samson notes. “As global enterprises push to scale their businesses through initiatives like cloud and social, information that previously resided in internal hardware will now be strewn across various devices and levels like on-premises, public clouds, social media and mobile. This will leave consumers, businesses and governments on constant high alert for increased risk, vulnerability and exposure.”

Cloud security complexity scales down

There is good news here, Samson says. In 2016 organizations will see cloud security evolve into simpler, virtualized controls and solutions that will have embedded security processes to help map current IT systems.

“Heavy, bolted-on protective layers that have difficulty scaling in the cloud will stay behind, and next year will have lighter, scalable cloud security solutions,” Samson says.

Backup and recovery back on top

Finally, “With the explosive growth of structured and unstructured data, improving backup and recovery time will be a big hurdle for the enterprise,” Samson predicts. He believes that vendors will rely on automated tiered solutions and data de-duplication to address the challenges of heterogeneity of technology.

“Encrypted data backups and agentless cloud-based replication will become the norm for data security,” Samson says.