infoTECH Feature

August 12, 2014

One of the Most Important Components of Cloud Adoption is Trust

There are a number of variables that influence an organization’s decision to migrate some or all of its business and technology processes to the cloud. Major motivators typically include capital and operational savings, flexibility and scalability and overall improved efficiencies. Not to mention a typically robust set of features that can go head to head with or better than legacy solutions.

And along with those benefits and advantages come the misgivings, and organizations all share a common one when contemplating a move to the cloud. It’s an issue of trust, and when it comes down to it, many companies simply do not trust the cloud yet, deeming it as immature, risky and potentially not entirely secure. Yet there are very good reasons to trust the cloud, just as there are ways to avoid common mistakes when migrating or adopting cloud computing technology.

Steve Riley, technical director at Riverbed (News - Alert) Technology, knows a thing or two about avoiding those mistakes and making the transition to the cloud a smooth one. Riverbed specializes in Application Performance Infrastructure solutions and offers a number of WAN optimization solutions while also playing in the SaaS (News - Alert) and cloud-based applications space. With 78 offices in 40 countries and more than 24,000 customers utilizing its solutions, the company is in a unique position to counsel about cloud migration.

“If security were truly a barrier to cloud adoption, then cloud computing would have evaporated years ago,” said Riley. “Obviously, that hasn’t happened; in fact, cloud is just going to keep growing and growing and growing.”

When it comes to trusting the cloud, Riley suggests looking at the compliance certifications held by AWS and Microsoft (News - Alert), two of the biggest cloud players. Each maintains a huge number of certifications and benchmarks, especially when compared to a random on-premise data center.

“Which do you think has better security processes, is better able to withstand relentless denial-of-service attacks, and can afford to maintain a global incident response capability?” asks Riley. “If anything, the large public clouds are more secure than on-premise IT. They also reduce the security and compliance burden for customers. If you’re managing something on-premise, the assets you need to secure and your scope of compliance is the full stack: from the concrete to the data. In the cloud, the provider handles the lower levels, from the concrete to the hypervisor—the undifferentiated heavy lifting of security. What’s in scope for the customer is less, and they need to spend time only on those security controls that actually represent the customer’s policies.”

Riley has been busy sharing his knowledge about the cloud this week at ITEXPO (News - Alert) in Las Vegas. Yesterday he presented the conference session “Do Your Customers Trust Your Cloud?” discussing how companies can attain that important trust in a competitive market. Today he will participate in a panel discussion on the “Top Five Mistakes Business Make When Going Cloud.” Moderated by TMC’s Erik Linask (News - Alert), the session will focus on the key strategic mistakes businesses make when moving to the cloud and how to avoid them.

The panel discussion will take place today at 11:30 a.m. PST and will also feature Henry Castillo of ABP Technology, Jesse Proudman of Blue Box Group and Chandler Vaughn of Codero Hosting.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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