Remember as a kid (or perhaps now as a parent) your mom would tell you, “When you go to Johnny’s house to play, go straight to his home, don’t stop anywhere in between, don’t take short cuts, and call me when you get there”? Your mom was managing what path to travel and other details to ensure safe arrival.
Read moreInformation security in any public cloud can meet contractual commitments and still allow your data to escape into the wild. This discontinuity is the subject of articles across the web, including documented cases of secure infrastructure plus lax polices equaling a data breach. Cloud providers for storage, services, application, infrastructure, etc. provide services and pricing that many executives and end users find enticing. The per-click, per-gig or per-transaction-only fees get our attention. The built-in redundancy, access from anywhere and ownership-eliminating possibilities cause us to think, how can this be a bad thing? Finally, the rigorous security compliance standards that some cloud service providers meet allows us to think, this will be OK. And it can all go very bad with one click.
Read moreImagine if you had a way to make all of the valuable possessions in your home become worthless (or of little value) if they left the perimeter of your home? There would be no incentive for a thief to steal from you. Why bother with the risk, time and effort to burglarize your home if there is no meaningful payoff? Now imagine if you could do the same with your data in your data center, or in a cloud environment such as cloud storage or cloud servers. If any data or piece of information left the cloud perimeter it would be rendered useless.
Read moreAccessing cloud-based resources, whether they be IaaS/PaaS/SaaS-based, is very convenient. With a browser and Internet connection, you are up and running. No driving to your work office, no need to log into the corporate network. Just open up your web browser and go. This convenience, however, comes with a security risk. All of your business work is conducted over an insecure communication network. Unlike your office network, where the network link between you and the data center is under corporate control and is physically secure, the cloud access link is over the Internet. The wild, uncontrolled, used-by-everyone-in-the-world Internet. There are no guarantees about who else has (or does not have) access to your network communication link. In fact, from a security perspective, we assume that the cloud link (i.e., the Internet) is unsecured and hostile. Any sensitive or private information WILL be accessed by someone else. This is why we have a need to protect “data in flight.” The data may be safe once it gets to the cloud provider, but during the transmission we need to protect it and ensure it remains private. To ensure secure communication across the Internet, a key fundamental cloud security principle is to encrypt the data transmission whenever you engage with a cloud resource. In this blog we introduce the security concept of protecting “data in flight” and explain how it operates.
Read moreIn order to remain competitive, businesses need to meet these new requirements with innovative and digitally personalized customer experiences that leverage location and social preferences. These same customers have been conditioned to provide their preference and location information willingly via mobile devices and social media. IT has to tap into this information and then lead the charge (with business sponsorship) to use digital technologies to maximize the value of IT investments and drive new business growth.
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