I now officially understand the IT events market. This fall I plan on hosting my own event. I decided that I will not concentrate on any specific domain of IT; instead I will open up sessions to anyone that really wants to host them. My keynote will however will be “Cloud Security and Why We Think You Need It”. I’m guaranteed a packed house of millions. Cloud security means so much… and so little.
If you haven’t guessed it, I’m making fun of the plethora of IT events that have come and gone in the last six months. From independent firms to the large analyst firms we seem to be having conversations about cloud security. In fact while I was at the Ipswitch booth at InfoSec in London recently, I was asked about the importance of cloud security by no less than 15 people. My answer was straightforward and simple.
“We cannot have a conversation about the cloud without having a conversation about what it means to provide, and more importantly consume, a service.”. Out of 15 people 14 of them nodded their heads in agreement and the last person was a vendor… “in order to understand how one consumes a service one needs to understand the importance of setting expectations and measuring if those expectations are being delivered. That means a service contract. The service contract should include all of the things that one would expect from the provider of that service including security, some measures of management and visibility. So if we can make the correlation between the cloud and services, we quickly understand that if I’m going to do business with cloud provider I need to ensure that they understand my expectations as to how I am consuming their cloud services.”.
Now let’s be real folks, how many of us would dare consume a service that was mission critical to the business that was not delivered on some type of secure socket layer? How many of us would sign up for services without being able to tell how well those services performed? And if these services could support mission-critical processes how many of us would not include some type of service level commitment in that contract?
Make no mistake I’m not saying that cloud security is irrelevant, I’m just suggesting that for technology providers to have conversations about cloud security is entirely off the mark. They should be having conversations around how to ensure that the data that is moved between center in the cloud is being properly governed and how that same data is being used by third-party cloud consumers like my business partners or other divisions in my business. Daryl Plummer and Beniot Lheureux, colleagues at Gartner, talk about intermediaries between companies and their cloud providers. They call them cloud brokerages. Cloud brokerages will continue to play a big part in the utilization and eventual widespread adoption of cloud technologies and services. Today companies like Sonoa, Vordel and Layer 7 provide excellent ways to intermediate between your on premise services and your cloud provider. We believe that the next generation of Ipswitch technology will allow intermediation between your on premise infrastructure and cloud providers when it comes to the movement of large data.
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About fkenney:
Frank Kenney is Vice President, Global Strategy and Product Management at Ipswitch, responsible for defining the company's vision and strategy and integrating his global perspective into the products, services and messaging. Frank brings an unmatched depth of experience and knowledge in the managed file transfer space to the team. Most recently, Frank was a Research Director at Gartner, Inc., responsible for analyzing topics including managed file transfer, application integration, SOA, and business process management. He initiated and drove the Magic Quadrants on managed file transfer and SOA governance technologies. Before joining Gartner, Frank was Director of Creative Services and Content Distribution at the Executive Business Group. Frank holds a degree in Music Technology from the Center for the Media Arts and has studied English and Computer Science at University of Tampa. When not working, Frank can be found living the life of a frustrated musician and producer in his home studio in Tampa.
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