EDITOR’S QUESTION
Mahmoud Samy
Regional Director, High
Growth Markets, Russia/CIS
& Middle East
The use of cloud computing is growing
rapidly. Adopters are motivated by the
prospects of increasing agility and gaining
access to more computing resources at
reduced costs. There are benefits for both
small and large enterprises. For example,
large enterprises build and manage
private-cloud environments internally for
basic infrastructure services, development
platforms, and whole applications while
smaller businesses primarily buy public-cloud
offerings, as they generally lack the scale to
set up their own clouds.
Despite the potential benefits that cloud
management offers, they also come with
risks. Both public and private sector CIOs are
constantly concerned about whether external
providers can ensure protection of sensitive
data and also compliance with regulations
of where certain data can be stored and who
can access the data. The CIOs are also asking
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whether building private clouds creates a
single point of vulnerability by accumulating
many different types of sensitive data onto
a single platform. There is a certain level of
anxiety for CIOs when it comes to security
surrounding cloud management. In order
to entice both the private and public sector
CIOs to engage a more comprehensive
cloud management system, it is important
that these CIOs take a role in the process by
ensuring that any potential vendor offers
basic security measures like encrypted data
and two-factor authentication. Then, once
a vendor’ security measures are considered
adequate, CIOs should look internally and
scan the enterprises’ new and existing
applications. Lastly, while working in cloud
environments, the CIOs have to understand
the risks inherent to third party and opensource software. These issues can be avoided
by using multi layered and effective security
solutions.
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