CIO OPINION
CIO
opinion
“
BUSINESSES ARE
REGULARLY SPINNING UP
NEW WORKLOADS AND
HAVE, IN SOME WAYS,
LOST PATIENCE WITH
THEIR SECURITY LEADERS.
//////////////////
Gidi Cohen, CEO and Founder, Skybox Security
Reclaiming the cloud:
How CISOs can ensure
security in cloud
initiatives
Cloud technology now
plays a central role in
the digital operation of
modern enterprises. But
security teams are often
being left out in the cold,
increasing the level of risk
an organisation is facing.
Gidi Cohen, CEO and
Founder, Skybox Security,
tells us how CISOs can be
part of the conversation
on securely adopting cloud
services – without being a
barrier to innovation.
38
INTELLIGENTCIO
T
he desire for cloud services
has reached a fever pitch. It’s
estimated that the public cloud
service market will be worth US$206
billion by the end of this year, with 83%
of all enterprise workloads set to be
hosted in the cloud by 2020. central role in all strategic discussions. In
many cases, however, this simply isn’t
happening. Instead of being seen as a
stabilising force that can help businesses
to realise the benefits of their cloud
projects, the perception of security has
been that it’s a barrier to change.
At the same time, the cloud technology
stack is becoming increasingly
complicated: organisations aren’t
just investing in cloud infrastructure
but also taking advantage of cloud-
native technologies such as containers,
orchestration tools and serverless
architectures to help them to further
improve efficiency and decrease costs. Because of this, the CISO has too often
been left out of the conversation. Only
in the last year or so has there been a
marked shift of enterprises bringing
cloud back under the purview of the
CISO; but it certainly hasn’t happened
across the board.
In the face of such great upheaval, it
would make sense for security to take a
For CISOs looking to ensure security plays
a central role in new cloud initiatives or
those already underway, they need to
know how and where security should
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