Convergence of the Cloud – A Nexus of Forces

The question looming large for many security professionals is how to tame the convergence of Cloud, Mobile and Big Data. While there are many discussions on the topic, there are no easy answers.

Many cloud service providers now offer standard services that include security shields. As a result, organizations are becoming more and more comfortable with moving data to the Cloud, but only for commodity services that are non-priorities. Organizations continue to be uncomfortable with moving confidential and privacy-related data to the Cloud. One challenge is creating a common security framework that would allow organizations to evaluate cloud service providers. Government efforts are underway to establish rules and regulations relating to a cloud security framework. One omnibus is to require any cloud provider that stores PHI or PII data to be liable for security breaches. It is expected that as those types of things happen, organizations will get more and more comfortable with moving sensitive data to the cloud.

In order for mobile to get traction, there needs to be a level of integration with the cloud. Leveraging a private cloud for mobility will allow businesses to virtualize the environment and provide mobile device access in a secure manner. As long as the data that is residing on the mobile devices is in a secure container and not intermingled with other data on the device, then security teams can protect the data while providing users with anywhere, anytime access.

The combination of mobile and cloud technologies seems like a match made in heaven for creating Big Data. Organizations are challenged with harnessing the data to gain intelligence and insight not only from business perspective, but a security perspective as well. Big data is helping organizations from a consumer-based analysis perspective. Through behavioral and trend analysis, companies can better predict and market to consumer preferences. In addition to analyses performed by the business units, security teams are looking to make use of Big Data to detect security-related trends.