In this episode of Cyber Security Inside, Camille and Tom take a dive into cloud security with Jo Peterson, Vice President Cloud & Security Services, Forbes Technology Council, CompTIA Advisory-Infrastructure. The conversation covers:
How the cloud has become a more integral part of businesses, and where we are headed with cloud.
What your responsibilities are for cloud security and the questions to ask when choosing a provider.
How artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things interact with cloud security.
What the biggest concerns are in cloud security and what experts are doing to make it more secure.
...and more. Don’t miss it!
We were honored to have Jo on the podcast, who has accomplished some amazing things this year! Check out her accolades:
Onalytica Who’s Who in Cybersecurity https://onalytica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Whos-Who-in-Cybersecurity.pdf
Engati LinkedIn 30 Top Voices in Tech https://www.engati.com/blog/linkedin-top-voices-in-tech
Thinkers360 Top 150 Women B2B Leaders to Follow in 2022 https://www.thinkers360.com/150-women-b2b-thought-leaders-you-should-follow-in-2022/
2016-2022 CRN Women of the Channel Recipient https://www.crn.com/rankings-and-lists/wotc2022.htm
Onalytica Who’s Who in the Cloud https://onalytica.com/blog/posts/whos-who-in-cloud/
The views and opinions expressed are those of the guests and author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Intel Corporation.
Here are some key takeaways:
When you don’t own the hardware you are using, what can you do to keep yourself secure? We are all sharing a lot of the same underlying infrastructure, and sharing information and data on the public cloud. Keeping it secure is very important.
Customers are concerned with outages and resiliency of cloud systems. And there are some things that customers can do. Having things like High Availability, housing workloads across multiple availability zones, supporting region routing, backing up data, encrypting data, and more! These are the top concerns of customers right now.
Often cloud breaches happen with unsecured assets because someone internally made a mistake somewhere. The Shared Responsibility Model needs to be flexible and apply to each cloud provider. And knowing your responsibility within that model is important.
Splitting up an application between on-prem and in a CSP sometimes depends on financial means. It is more costly to run something in the cloud because of bandwidth and latency. So for one application, some of the storage might be on-prem and some of the computing might be done in the cloud, with you traversing back and forth.
Splitting up presences across geographic locations is also smart. If you have a west coast presence, but there is an earthquake that damages your systems, having an east coast presence as well is useful. And you can balance the application with application load balancers in those different availability zones.
There are a lot of suggestions and how-tos for best practices and using availability zones. But it also takes some technical knowledge and practice on how to build a secure cloud environment. At the end of the day, you are building your own infrastructure.
Cloud has grown and changed a lot over time, and it is still growing and changing. Especially with work from home, how we connect to the cloud and use it has changed. Maybe it’s time to do identity based, maybe the tech for VPNs still hold. We have to rethink who we are letting access data, and continually rethink as things change.
What advice does Jo Peterson have for people trying to select a cloud service provider partner? Know your inventory first, and know what you want to move to the cloud. Then look at what you have chosen and decide what specialization you might want to go with based on what you have.
When looking for a cloud service provider, it is important to know what you need and to find someone who specializes in that. If you are multinational, find someone who knows the regulations. If you are a beginner, find someone that can guide you and help you with what you need, specifically.
Artificial intelligence and the cloud are both increasing in use and they support each other. Businesses need both in the future, and they work together. With the Internet of Things, AI and the cloud will both be utilized.
Some interesting quotes from today’s episode:
“Recently, one of the major cloud hyperscalers had an outage. They actually had a couple in a row. And cloud systems are expected to always be on and news like that makes the headlines. What I’m hearing customers talk about is maybe the need to rethink a strategy about having all their eggs in one basket.” - Jo Peterson
“Have you secured your user end points? That translates into all end points. You might have the users squared away, but maybe you don’t have your VM squared away. Maybe you don’t have your server squared away.” - Jo Peterson
“Wherever the disaster happens, it’s still a disaster. So if you’re running in a different availability zone, you’re theoretically dealing with a whole other stack of infrastructure.” - Jo Peterson on how availability zones are useful protections from natural disasters to hackers
“All of the hyperscalers do a really great job of helping to inform and educate potential clients. So every one of them has how-to guides. But at the end of the day, it’s you building your infrastructure. So what I see happen in shops that don’t have a lot of help, is they’ll go to a managed service provider, a CSP, first to get that sort of architectural best practice from that company. And they’ll learn as they go.” - Jo Peterson
“Well, cloud is a teenager, and it’s growing up. There’s things that are happening as it grows up and matures. The world around it is changing and its world is changing. So there’s this sort of dual effect.” - Jo Peterson
“Current estimates expect today’s $2.5 billion ML market (cloud ML market) to reach $13 billion by 2025. It’s a pretty big increase, right? And Deloitte put out a 2020 study of AI that revealed that 83% of organizations expect AI to be critical to their business success in the next two years. So cloud drives measurable benefits for AI programs.” - Jo Peterson
“I think we’re just going to be seeing more AI and cloud together, like peanut butter and jelly.” - Jo Peterson
“I think we’re going to see, particularly in certain verticals, like retail, healthcare… We’ll see edge cloud deployments. And he who has the data and he who uses the data is going to be first. You’re going to see market disruption. You’re going to see first to market advantage by companies that are using that edge, that customer data most creatively.” - Jo Peterson