The potential risks assessed with migration and adoption of Cloud as a business platform
"Digital businesses cannot afford to have unauthorized data access in the Cloud nor have their Cloud Services Provider unexpectedly shut down shop," says Yasser Zeineldin, CEO at eHosting DataFort.
Many of the regional IT managers have raised this concern if organizations would ever adopt Cloud as a platform or not. They ponder that Cloud is perfect for specific workloads but they would never transfer the mission-critical workloads to an external platform.
As of now, many IT managers have changed their mindset to embrace Cloud as a business authorized platform while mission-critical workloads can be kept on either Hybrid Cloud Platform or Private Cloud.
The surpassing agility benefits and the cost of Public Cloud Platform are impressively driving double-digit growth rate into this field. Large Cloud providers are getting attracted to invest locally especially in the region and in countries like UAE and Saudi Arabia due to the profound requirements of in-country data and compliance. Based on the global research and consulting firm Gartner, the number of Managed Cloud Services is expected to triple by 2020.
So, Cloud adoption and migration is being rapidly moving forward. Although global risk and cyber security executives are concerned about the weak security controls and policies across emerging Cloud-data platforms.
Well, adoption and migration of Cloud encompasses unparalleled benefits and brings out agility into the organization but the cyber security managers must balance the speed of adoption with the growing levels of control and compliance into the Cloud. Audits like GDPR and many other country-level audits as well as punitive measures by Board do not permit any lack of diligence by IT and cyber security managers in this field. There are two principal risk factors for organizations who are actively moving to Cloud. The first risk area is the migration of on-premises data to Cloud platforms which can include sensitive or confidential data and the historical data about the firm, its suppliers and its customers.
The second area of risk is about the economic, financial and technology stability of the Cloud Hosting Provider and its suppliers. IT and cyber security managers must acknowledge if their Cloud Service Providers change their Service Level Agreements or show any inability to provide their services.
The two risks, namely unauthorized access to Cloud data and inability to provide Cloud services because of compliance by either the Cloud Service Provider or the firm can lead to worst consequences for the firm. Global advisory firms like Gartner are drawing attention to the potential data risk in Cloud Computing.
Thus, end users are suggested to engage with economically and financially stable Cloud Service Providers.
