The issue for cloud adopters is no longer where your data sits in AWS, on-premises, Azure, Salesforce, or what have you. The important questions are: Who has access to it, and how is it protected?
Cloud adoption is becoming more a matter of when, not if, for most major enterprises. McAfee estimates that 97% of organizations use some form of cloud services today, with the unstated supposition that more plan on transitioning a portion of their remaining on-premises IT assets to cloud infrastructure or analogous cloud services over the next few years.
Recent headlines have highlighted many examples of what many security experts have been concerned about for some time — the cyber-risk impact of moving data, assets, and infrastructure to cloud services, and the increased threat profile that is supposed to follow hand in hand. In one recent study, HyTrust found that the highest-priority concern for most IT executives when considering cloud adoption and cloud migration was cybersecurity — how to protect data, assets, and infrastructure when their organization no longer controls the entire technology stack underneath.
