Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 34 | Page 25

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// TRENDING SEEING THROUGH THE CLOUD TO ENSURE SECURITY A McAfee study underlines the ubiquitous nature of cloud services but managing these requires specialised knowledge. Raj Samani, Chief Scientist at McAfee, tells us how to address the security challenges this presents. He argues that better visibility enables organisations to respond more quickly to cloud security threats. C loud services are nearly ubiquitous, with 97% of worldwide IT professionals surveyed using some type of cloud functions in their organisation, up from 93% just one year ago, according to data from a recent McAfee study. Indeed, this cloud-first strategy has driven organisations to take on many different providers in their cloud ecosystem. As organisations tackle new data use initiatives, intelligence building, new capabilities to store and execute on applications, we have seen an explosion in the number of sanctioned cloud providers that businesses www.intelligentcio.com are reporting, each a source of potential risk and management need for the organisation. The provider count requires readiness in governance strategy that joins security capabilities and procurement together to protect the data entrusted to each new cloud deployment. As a consequence, security operations teams will need to have enhanced visibility, that is unified, to compose a picture across so many different environments containing enterprise data and then map this visibility against resources to ensure the “ ORGANISATIONS ARE NOT ONLY LACKING CYBERSECURITY TALENT, BUT SUFFICIENT CLOUD SECURITY TALENT. INTELLIGENTCIO 25