Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 35 | Page 38

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 www.intelligentcio.com