Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 40 | Page 20

LATEST INTELLIGENCE PRESENTED BY Download whitepaper here 20 INTELLIGENTCIO T oday, an increasing number of organizations are taking advantage of the benefits of cloud- based infrastructure by making the journey to public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Some that are further along in their cloud journeys leverage DevOps pipelines to increase their business agility, while others focus on cost savings and access to on-demand compute. As cloud vendors including AWS, Azure and Google make clear, security in the cloud is a shared responsibility. Though the public cloud vendors take great efforts to secure the cloud infrastructure – compute, storage, etc – their customers are fully responsible for protecting basically everything above the hypervisor, including the operating system, applications, data, access to external resources and other assets and infrastructure. The business benefits are very real, but as more business-critical applications and services migrate to the cloud, ensuring the security of these cloud workloads becomes essential – as does the need to maintain and enforce enterprise-wide security policies in a consistent way. While the benefits of cloud computing are very real for organizations, so too are the responsibilities around ensuring the security of the organization’s cloud workloads. The vulnerabilities within the organization’s cloud workloads are also very real, as some unfortunate organizations have found to their peril. n www.intelligentcio.com