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http://dcseurope.info/n/wdnn
Cloud computing: security should no longer be a separate issue
Is Cloud computing really a brave new world or a rather familiar landscape under a new guise? asks Simon Denman, Head of Marketing, NETASQ.
T
here was a time when money and wealth were tangible assets which could be hoarded and locked away. Like treasured possessions, money was stored in safes and vaults with multiple layers of protection and ultimately ring-fenced by a secure perimeter of some sort. The first banks were simply outsourced vaults in which economies of scale paid for more elaborate security measures to be shared by all.
But where is our money now? The idea that we could walk into a bank and ask the manager for a reassuring glimpse of our stash now seems ludicrous. For the most part, the salaries paid into our personal bank accounts are mere numbers in a computer, and therefore indistinguishable from the salaries of anybody else (except of course in size).
Our money has, in effect, become virtualised, residing in different places and in different forms, accessible from anywhere, at any time and using a variety of different methods and devices.
Does this not sound rather similar to the current global trend towards cloud computing? The old paradigm of corporate data and applications stored entirely within onsite servers is all but gone. The networks still exist, and of course they still need to be secured, but with key applications and data increasingly distributed across a nebulous combination of public and private infrastructures the old perimeter defences clearly need to be rethought.
Those charged with securing financial assets within the banking sector must surely have faced very similar challenges as customers demanded greater access to their money. No longer could they rely
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on the inherent security of a bank’s four walls to control and safeguard withdrawals and transfers. Instead our funds needed to be accessible via automated telling machines, telephone call-centres and internet browsers, all from anywhere in the world.
As with cloud computing, such changes brought lower costs, greater scalability and greater agility to the business, but in both cases, the potential attack surface increased. One area where cloud computing could learn a trick or two from the banks, is in the way additional security was designed into the new banking software and systems at source, rather than being added as an afterthought. One reason for this is that, with perhaps the exception of virtualisation, cloud computing has not required development of new systems to the same extent as did the analogous transformation of banking.
Nevertheless, even if the technology is not fundamentally new, we should always ensure that any new cloud architecture – especially public / private hybrids – has intrinsic security built into the network design.
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