The Snowden Leaks One Year Later: Key Lessons Cloud Providers Learned
June 6, 2014
Grazed from eWeek. Author: Chris Preimesberger.
The period of eight days from June 5 to June 12, 2013, was monumental in the history of data security. The timeline: June 5, 2013: The Guardian reports that the U.S. government has obtained a secret court order that requires Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of Americans to the National Security Administration. June 6: The Guardian and the Washington Post disclose the existence of PRISM, a program that allows the NSA to extract the details of customer activities—including "audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents" and other materials—from computers at Microsoft, Google, Apple and other Internet companies.
June 9: The Guardian and Post disclose former Booz Allen IT specialist Edward Snowden as their source for the intelligence-related leaks. June 12: The South China Morning Post publishes an interview with Snowden in which he says that U.S. intelligence agents have been hacking networks around the world for years. The U.S. IT industry then went on the defensive amid concerns that customers would shift their hosted data and services to providers in other parts of the world. U.S. businesses ostensibly stood to lose up to $180 billion, according to Forrester…
For a look into what cloud service providers learned from the NSA scandal over the past year, eWEEK consulted with Simon Aspinall, CMO at enterprise cloud software and services provider Virtustream. Aspinall believes that the scandal brought the issue of security and compliance to the forefront of cloud computing and overall resulted in positive changes for the industry…