Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Compliance In The Cloud Era–New Pressures

Interesting article in Information Week going over the results where they surveyed 422 business technology professionals about compliance. Not surprising one of the top technologies identified to aid in compliance was identity management.

ScreenHunter_03 Jul. 31 11.41

The image above – from the article – is interesting. A whole 6% of businesses will use the cloud regardless of compliance concerns. The other 94% of the businesses – according to the graphic – either won’t put data in the cloud that is subject to compliance or need to assure themselves that they’d remain compliant. I hate to be glass “half-empty” but one could read that as 94% of respondents won’t risk the cloud for data subject to compliance.

With all of the hype around privileged account management it is interesting to see that there are nearly no vendors that support PAM for cloud service providers. Also, the same goes for both discovery of data in the cloud that might be subject to compliance regulations (e.g. an Excel spreadsheet with social security numbers in an Office 365 document) and data loss protection (DLP) solutions.

So either a lot of companies (i.e., more than 6% noted in the graphic) are just doing it or they are leveraging private clouds. But, if they are leveraging private clouds they still have issues managing privileged accounts and discovery/DLP.

Yes, the cloud is generating new pressures.

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