Is Cloud Security An Exaggerated Concern?
The results are in: We have made zero progress since 2010. This was the year that IDC published results of a survey regarding cloud computing, and it found that security was the biggest barrier toward adoption. This statistic has found its way onto pretty much every presentation about cloud computing since 2010.
Well the year is 2016, and a recent Intel Security study asked 1,200 IT decision-makers what their biggest concern is; the most common answer was data breaches. What is remarkable about this is that the next question in the survey asked respondents to comment on what issues they have experienced, and they were not security related. In fact, the biggest issue was the difficulty in migrating services or data. Incidentally, this is likely to get worse as the use of platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service become more ubiquitous.
This does beg the question as to whether the issue of security concerns is exaggerated. Indeed, those of you that have heard me speak know that I do not believe the term “cloud security” is even an issue. Firstly, the concept of cloud is misused. If we strictly adhere to the NIST definition as per NIST 800-145, then the number of service providers offering a cloud service is a lot smaller than Google results suggest.
