Sony, Citi, Sega, CIA and the list grows daily. These are major operations that have had their online data compromised in the last few weeks and the world press seems to revel in reporting these lapses in security. At least it takes their attention away from 'bill shock', their other perennial favorite telco whipping horse.
Although not directly involved with the latest round of breaches, the telecoms industry as a whole must be grimacing at the bad press it generates for any online services, especially as they embark on their own mass of cloud service offerings. If such respected and previously secure companies as those listed above are being successfully encroached, what hope does the fledgling telco cloud provider have in convincing would-be customers, especially enterprise, that their data is safe and secure in the new virtualized world.
The Insider has
raised this issue previously but the situation does not appear to be improving and CSPs themselves, are appearing increasingly more nervous about the whole cloud space, and can you blame them? Losing your own data is one thing but losing a customer's corporate information, including trade secrets, accounting info, internal email and product specs may be another matter altogether. The potential cost of litigation may only be exceeded by the professional indemnity cover that will be required!
We may soon see the emergence of limited liability havens, like tax havens, that will foster local storage of data from around the world with the promise of some sort of protection from litigation if something does go terribly wrong. That may sound a little far-fetched but think about all those medical specialists that have moved from litigation-happy USA to Asia and setup their practices there simply to reduce their massive insurance overheads and constant fear of being sued by anybody with a gripe. Medical tourism is booming in countries like Thailand and Singapore, will data storage follow suit?
Seriously, though, data security will dominate concerns for some time. It appears that no amount of in-place security is able to stop the most hardened hackers. Up until recently, the work appeared to be undertaken by individuals keen to show how clever they are, but today, stolen data is appearing for sale and distributed online within hours. The Insider has become so concerned he spent a whole weekend changing over one hundred online passwords using a complex password generator and onboard secure storage software simply to keep track of all of them. Even this cannot guarantee security of personal data. It simply means that if one site is compromised the password will not work on any other.
However, cloud service providers must be wondering what they will have to do, not only in setting up secure systems, but whether the increased cost of doing cloud business and the risk associated with it are even worth it. Finding staff that are qualified to install the highest security standards will also become an issue. Internal fraud operations will have to be trained up to be able to monitor the new risks and law enforcement agencies will have to expand to include greater forensic data fraud skills.
Ex-hackers could be very much in demand, should they wish to divulge their murky pasts on a CV. Just take a look at the number of ads on job boards for security skills and check out how much the big three are charging for security audits and forensic data security investigations to see how the basic laws of supply and demand work. Data security is BIG and growing, and the more damaging news headlines that appear, the greater the concern driving that growth.
Posted
06-20-2011 5:03 AM
by
The Insider