Cloud based services offer a simple way for New Zealand organisations to increase capacity, add new capabilities and respond to demands without large capital investment in infrastructure, licensing or the time delay of training a team.
The ease and flexibility of services delivered from the cloud such as DropBox often overlook the requirement to retain control and governance of business critical data.
But the flexibility poses many questions. Who manages the data, who controls access, can it be copied and replicated, how many versions are there and where is the data stored?
Lower operational cost does not reflect the value of a company's data which is often only realised at the point of impact with a loss or a breach.
From our experience MPA has found there are widespread concerns about the safety and governance of company data residing in the cloud. These concerns are often the limiting factor to a wider adoption of the cloud and are fueled by well publicised cases such as Epsilon, the cloud-based email marketing services company. The primary risk from their recent data breach is that the attackers have a list of millions of active email addresses to target with phishing attacks, resulting in an estimated cost impact of between $3 and $4 billion.
Encrypting your data and retaining control of who can access that data are the simplest and most effective mechanisms for a business to trust the cloud.
Through MPA and SafeNet's 'Trusted Cloud Fabric' we provide a comprehensive set of security solutions. These practical solutions focus on a data-centric approach where the data is encrypted and the corresponding keys which unlock the data reside in your network, hence access to the data is managed by you in the cloud. In the event that the data is compromised it's unreadable without the keys, which you control.
MPA are experts in solving business problems using world class technology. For a copy of the MPA Guide to Securing your Data in the Cloud, please contact jaco.vanderwesthuizen@mpa.co.nz.
Jaco has 8 years experience within the IT sector across United Kingdom, South Africa and New Zealand. His areas of expertise include all aspects of security, including perimeter, web, email, network and managed security and cloud computing. In South Africa he managed a portfolio of customers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA region) with large enterprise companies including government departments, banking and financial, defence organisations. His expertise is now focused on the protection of high-value information assets, helping NZ companies to protect and manage their security systems throughout their lifecycles. Jaco holds an Electrical Engineering Diploma from Cape Town Tech and Microsoft Certified professional certificate.
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