Cloud Computing: The Business of Security Is Business

Grazed from Wired. Author: Dan Holden.

Today’s security landscape feels more like a James Bond movie than normal life. International intrigue is now a standard equation for any large-scale cyber-attack, as we’ve seen recently with the Sony breach and the potential for North Korea being behind it all. Events like this are great fodder for politicos and make for glib and gossipy water cooler talk about the latest celebrity leaks, but they obscure the real dangers just beneath the surface.

What if skilled, persistent attackers targeted critical infrastructure like the water supply or electric grid, rather than a Hollywood studio pushing a silly movie? What if they targeted your business? With many calling 2014 the year of the data breach, corporate security teams are on notice. They face a wide range of threat actors, from nation-state cyber espionage to highly skilled patient attackers for hire, down to home gamers and nuisance attackers…

Corporate IT and security teams are feeling the pressure of this dynamic threat landscape. They know they’re being targeted and that they are vulnerable. A CISOs challenge today is incredibly difficult. Two monumental structural changes, mobility and cloud computing, have transformed their networks from well-defined and protected “walled gardens” to distributed collections of third party partners, with varying degrees of security capabilities. Today, essentially, the Internet is the corporate network…

Read more from the source @ http://www.wired.com/2014/12/the-business-of-security-is-business/