As many of you were enjoying the delights that Dreamforce had to offer, there were some of us, who were very much interested in Gartner’s Security & Risk Management Summits taking place around the globe.
It has long been acknowledged that security was a real issue for cloud computing, but the summits sought to bring together dozens of risk managers and IT security professionals to showcase risk and security products. Hot topics on the summit agenda was mobile applications & security; bring your own device (BYOD); cloud computing and security, governance risk and compliance and data loss prevention.
As mentioned in one of our previous blogs, according to Gartner, the biggest influences that are changing the way we approach IT are mobile, social, cloud and big data. But, with these changes we also see the challenges of transforming your business. In order to survive the challenges, whilst ensuring that your business continues to prosper you need to be building a strategic plan to deliver adequate protection, whilst understanding the four forces that are driving the change.
Security and IT managers need to really understand the business, whilst ensuring that IT is supporting the businesses goals. But to do this, you must first define the purpose of the business; its objectives and processes and understand where IT systems sit within this. Only then will you understand where security risks might lie, so that you can build a policy and an infrastructure around them.
It is predicted that around 52% of large enterprises are using some form of security services, but until now SME’s have struggled to overcome these challenges, as their resources determine that they would have to buy many products to offer them the same protection as larger enterprises. Business have not wanted to migrate from legacy systems to new platforms on their own, and as a result the service cloud providers are now looking to offer storage, system networking, computing and security all rolled into one neat package.
Michael Dell, CEO of Dell, said that they saw the need to offer security across connected devices, such as smart phones and laptops; infrastructure and cloud storage, and security as one seamless service. This level of structure is now offering small businesses the same level of protection that was previously unavailable to them, making the shift to the cloud suddenly much less daunting.
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