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23 Mar 2010
A European survey of members of the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) has found that 40 per cent of companies in the UK are using cloud computing systems, compared with a third of European organisations.
The survey found that a quarter of UK enterprises, and one in five smaller UK firms, are implementing cloud computing systems, even though they are not confident that the risk will be worth the reward.
"Every day we take calculated risks," said Paul Williams, strategy chairman at the ISACA.
"Organisations need an integrated risk management approach to identify, assess and prioritise risks, so that they only take appropriate gambles with acceptable consequences or level of reward. Enterprises must never crash and burn because the risk was ignored or misjudged."
There was further differentiation in the way European and UK organisations mitigate against risk, the survey found. British firms prefer to concentrate on co-ordination between IT risk management and overall enterprise risk management, while European companiees focus investment on staff risk awareness training.
In terms of risk factors, by far the biggest concern for the 1,529 ISACA members surveyed was that their employees could reveal corporate data, followed by the use of unapproved software or online services. Most companies regard social networking as low risk.
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Cloud computing rewards are too huge to ignore
In the current scenario, the risks of cloud computing may seem like they outweigh the benefits, but the rewards are too huge to ignore from a strategic perspective for any organisition. A recent IDC survey, which deeply evaluated cloud computing technology, reported that budget pressures are increasing but the knowledge of what cloud has to offer is also developing. This is leading to an increase in adoption this year and the future. The IDC survey on cloud computing, found that the list of challenges seem to be larger than the benefits. To achieve a higher level of enterprise adoption, there are some key issues to be sorted and settled in the coming years. These include concerns about the stability of hosting environments, financial stability of the providers, challenges regarding the ability to move from one provider to other, and others. Also, the need to secure the data in the cloud seems to be the biggest concern of the financial services companies. There are various other concerns around global location support, compliance to international standards and others. Despite this however, many organisations are experimenting with the technology for testing new services, deploying low priority business applications and web collaboration efforts. The strong benefits such as low cost of total ownership and benefiting from the expertise of a cloud provider would suggest that the risks are worth taking. As IT suppliers and cloud buyers work closely on the key challenges like security, privacy and rolling out meaningful solutions and offerings, the situation will be completely different and the risks will be reduced significantly.
Posted by: Srinivas Prabhala, Infosys 29 Mar 2010
Dive a little deeper
Interesting survey but if we dive a little deeper we see a whopping 35% of respondents do not plan to use Cloud for any IT services (actually 35.6% in Europe and 31.8% in the UK). This is a huge impediment to the growth of ItaaS ? IT as a Service, such as SaaS, IaaS and PaaS respectively Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service. Let's spin this another way: 60% of respondents are not using Cloud yet, and of these more than half do not plan to use it at all. Why is that? How come despite all the benefits around Clouds, so many are not planning on leveraging this approach to IT? The survey doesn't provide answers. But it gives interesting clues concerning the role of underlying Risk Management approaches. The more respondents have a formal Risk Management process, the more they adopt Clouds. Having a Risk Management process and knowingly managing risk allows businesses to take the guesswork and the affect out of the security equation by providing visibility into the risks and the rewards of using Clouds. It's all about visibility - the enabler that permits businesses to make informed decisions. There will always be inherent risk in using Clouds, just listen to the nay-sayers and they'll give you a handful and mouthful of reasons why you shouldn't use Clouds. But that's true from any technologies; phones, cars, gas stoves? all we need is visibility to make informed decisions. Visibility inside the Cloud would help take rate as well, and would make people feel more warm and fuzzy about using ItaaS, demystifying this new technology. So how could Clouds provide visibility in their inner working without disclosing confidential information and exposing trade secrets? How could Cloud providers convince those 60% of respondents not yet using Clouds, and especially those 35% not planning to use Clouds, that it's safe for them to use this emerging technology? We're providing answers; it's called Log Management, check it out at www.loglogic.com
Posted by: Gorka Sadowski, Security Architect, LogLogic www.loglogic.com 26 Mar 2010