The Dynamics of Cloud Adoption
We may not wear pith helmets or have to hack our way through actual jungles, but as IT professionals today, we’re every bit as much breaking new ground, facing unknown threats and charting courses through unknown territory as our outward-bound Victorian forebears.
Cloud adoption is happening, right now. New security threats present themselves on a near-daily basis. Mobile is everywhere, constantly gaining traction across an ever wider range of applications. New technologies arise in a continual stream. Near field communications, biometric recognition, cloud-based AI, holographic phone screens are all here, today.
Opportunities and Threats
Much like those nineteenth-century explorers, today’s enterprise IT environment presents significant opportunities, but also monumental challenges. Some of these we are already aware of, while others have yet to become apparent.
As was the case for the adventurers of yesteryear, it will be the organisations which most effectively mitigate the risks and exploit the opportunities which will survive the 21st century IT jungle, and enjoy the benefits it has to offer.
Technology is key, but it is essential that the right technology is deployed, in the right way, at the right time, at the right point in the IT estate, according to a comprehensive, fully thought-through datacentre modernisation strategy. Like the pith helmet and the blunderbuss, point solutions have had their day.
Business Outcomes
As IT professionals today we need to focus on business outcomes, not simply keeping services running. We need to deliver enhanced business value, providing services that will improve customer and employee experience, increase productivity, expand productivity and reduce time to market.
Modern IT services like this demand a properly modernised datacentre, effectively secured against the diverse threats arrayed against it.
It’s a Jungle Out There
A key characteristic of the digital revolution currently underway across all sectors is the penetration of digital technology ever further into the enterprise. This has exposed a continually expanding array of platforms, applications, data and other resources to potential attack.
The digital revolution within the enterprise is mirrored by that in the world outside. As a result the threat landscape really is now a fully fledged landscape – a vast, tangled, constantly shifting and growing jungle, with a multitude of hiding places for cyber miscreants, and endless dark paths down which only the ill-informed or reckless go.
The size and complexity of this jungle makes security a challenge of mountainous proportions. With data stored on all manner of devices, some owned and controlled by the enterprise and others by employees or even third parties, and rapidly accelerating, often barely controlled public cloud adoption, most IT departments cannot even identify what data the organisation owns and where it is at any given moment, much less secure it all.
2018: Over 1 Billion Victims
This confluence of risk factors has made data breaches, and the immense damage they can do, significantly more likely, a phenomenon to which recent headlines will attest./datacentre-contact-us/
The Cambridge Analytica / Facebook scandal of March 2018 compromised over 80 million users’ data.
In June this year, Florida-based Exactis suffered a breach involving hundreds of millions of individuals’ personal information.
Just a few months earlier, India’s Aadhaar biometric identification system was breached, exposing the personal data of all of India’s 1.1 billion registered individuals.
We have reached, and in many cases are way beyond, the point at which enterprises must encrypt all data, whether it’s in storage or in transit; whether it resides in the cloud, in the datacentre or on one of the extensive range of endpoint devices employed by users.
Technology to deliver this level of encryption is available. Rubrik’s Cloud Data Management platform, for example, provides end-to-end encryption of all data in all environments, without impacting performance. User access is safeguarded via the enterprise’s own trusted Certificate Authority (CA) TLS certificates. Role-based access control limits each individual’s access to pre-approved objects, blocking the accessing, amendment or deletion of data beyond their remit.
What are Your Priorities?
Encryption is just one aspect of effective datacentre modernisation, though. Your specific priorities, challenges and opportunities will, of course, be unique to your enterprise.
Perhaps your primary need will be to improve infrastructure, application or data security? Maybe to bring CAPEX or OPEX under control? Possibly to boost performance or deliver services and apps more quickly? Or to shift specific workloads from on-premise execution to private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructure?
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