With cloud computing becoming preferred choice of the business more so in uncertain economic landscape, these are hey-days for the cyber villains who find cloud as greener pastures for making money by hacking cloud infrastructure.
Today, Cloud Computing has taken a centre stage in the technology world. Cloud computing is quickly gaining momentum and its growth is really impressive. Rajesh Awasthi, Director Telecom & Cloud Service Provider, NetApp India says, “Cloud computing is now old enough to do some great things and has emerged as the key advance in IT service and applications delivery.”
Srinivas Tadigadapa, Director, Enterprise Sales, Intel South Asia says, “Today we are witnessing aggressive deployment for cloud in the APAC region, Cloud users will begin to demand standardized, open, interoperable platforms for cloud computing. As businesses begin to rely on the cloud for general business operation, the demand for unrestricted use - bringing data in and out of the cloud – is increasing."
Security is becoming complex with the each passing day. A decade earlier businesses were happy by giving their employees logins to the networks and asking them not to divulge their passwords to anyone. That was the end of security advice. Needless to say, the security scene is far more complex and IT managers are under pressure to secure the company’s digital assets and network.
Over the past year, we have seen a steady growth of cloud adoption in India. Almost all IT vendors in India have already made their presence felt in the market with their cloud offerings. Even global players operating in India have tailored their cloud offerings to suit the domestic market. Cloud has been successful in India for multiple reasons. One of the most significant reasons is the demand from global companies, which is met by the IT industry in India. The micro, small, and medium businesses, which tend to be budget-constrained when it comes to hiring information technology (IT) professionals and building IT infrastructure, find cloud computing beneficial in bringing down the cost of ownership. Productivity gains and cost savings are other factors driving adoption of cloud in India.
Andy Karandikar, Pre-sales & Services Head - Red Hat India, says, “Earlier IT was more around the periphery but today this has expanded into other areas such as virtualization, cloud and even application development.”
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| Rajesh Awasthi Director Telecom & Cloud Service Provider, NetApp India | Vamsicharan Mudiam Country Manager, Cloud Solutions, IBM, India/South Asia | Srinivas Tadigadapa Director-Enterprise Sales, Intel South Asia | Shantanu Ghosh VP and MD, India Product Operations, Symantec |
“While market is still maturing to cloud, in India, Security and continuous availability of power are the key deterrent for the industry to adopt cloud,” says Kartik Shahani, Country Manager, RSA India.
As against few years back, today we have appliances, applications & tools to defend against the newer threats. Organizations (vendors & customers) sell and buy newer tools, appliances etc. in their haste to plug weaknesses. However, the technology or the solution itself is new and vendor community does not have certified personnel on their board. The solution is deployed and a ‘so-called’ knowledge transfer happens between vendor specialist & IT security team.
Shantanu Ghosh, VP and MD, India Product Operations, Symantec says, “With a paradigm shift in the adoption of Cloud Computing, Virtualization and Mobility and the way consumers and businesses access data, Symantec engineers globally focus on innovations that enable customers to confidently protect their information driven world.”
According to Symantec’s recent ‘Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud 2013 Survey’, Indian organizations are widely migrating to the cloud to gain competitive advantages around speed, agility and flexibility. According to the survey, there is an increasing complexity and the proliferation of "rogue clouds" - business groups implementing public cloud applications that are not managed by the company's IT infrastructure. The survey found that nearly two-thirds organizations have lost cloud data (60 percent of enterprises and 70 percent of SMBs), and most (80 percent) have experienced recovery failures.
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| Kartik Shahani Country Manager, RSA India | Prakash Krishnamoorthy Country Manager, HP Networking, HP India | Andy Karandikar Pre-sales & Services Head - Red Hat India | Neeraj Mediratta CEO, Ace Data Devices Pvt. Ltd. |
Addressing the security concerns in Cloud
Cloud security is not so much a technology issue as it is a trust issue. Much (though not all) of the technologies, services, methodologies and know-how needed to secure the cloud already exists and need to be extended from the enterprise into the cloud. What is needed to make cloud computing a truly ubiquitous services platform is a higher degree of trust, particularly between the owner-providers of cloud resources and the companies that use those resources.
There are many companies providing services through private and public clouds. Each has its own requirements and processes for authenticating and authorizing users. As these services connect and share information with each other, each service provider must be sure that it knows the degree to which it can trust the cloud, services and users - whether human or machine - with which it transacts. The services provider may have the best information security system in the world, but its efforts are useless if it’s granting peer-level access to cloud partners with less stringent security standards.
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Guna Sekaran R
Country Manager
Quantum India & Sri Lanka
Trust relationships are about establishing hierarchies and knowing who can be counted on to protect and treat shared resources and sensitive information appropriately. It’s about trusting not just who you’re transacting with, but also how they provide services and security. When expectations between parties are formalized and organized through ties of federation, the result is not just a safer community of users, but one that interacts more conveniently, openly and productively.
Vamsicharan Mudiam, Country Manager, Cloud Solutions, IBM, India/South Asia, says, “Companies are increasingly aware of the business value that cloud computing brings and are taking steps towards transition to the cloud. But despite opening up some new possibilities for businesses, it is also throwing up new challenges.” These challenges range from the implementation of cloud technology, to securing application and infrastructure, ensuring interoperability and governance at the same time. Fundamentally it is important for the cloud services providers to be able to assure the security of these newmodels in order to build trust and confidence. “The key to establishing trust in these new models is choosing the right cloud computing model for your organization. Place the right workloads in the right model with the right security mechanisms,” says Vamsicharan.
Guna Sekaran R, Country Manager, Quantum India & Sri Lanka, says, “Quantum also enables channel partners to develop offsite targets for their customers' data. While customers may have concerns with backing up to a third-party's data centre, their value-added reseller is often a fully trusted partner. Therefore, if Quantum's channel partners set up their own data centres then their customers can do a local backup with built-in deduplication and then replicate the backups over the WAN to Quantum's channel partners.”
Neeraj Mediratta- CEO, Ace Data Devices Pvt. Ltd, says, “Our cloud solution is fully secure with FIPS certified AES 256 bit encryption before moving the data out of the customer’s network. This helps us ensure that data is secure. The encryption keys are defined by the customer’s system administrator. Apart from these key software features, our environment is protected with firewalls, security tools and anti-virus tools being updated regularly to ensure that the data is safe.”
Shantanu of Symantec says, “To achieve a safe cloud environment, organizations need to enforce rigorous cloud strategies around the protection of policy, information, people and infrastructures. Symantec’s number one goal is to protect companies, information and people on the cloud, of today and in the future.” He adds, “ We’re applying decades of security and storage expertise and our own cloud expertise to help enterprises, service providers and small- and medium-sized businesses execute their cloud strategies to achieve the full advantages of cloud computing.”
Andy of Red Hat says, “Red Hat meets compliance regulations, protects computing infrastructure, provides a safe pathway to the cloud.” He says that a hybrid cloud solution provides the best of both the world. It offers the customers with the control and security of a private cloud, while allowing them avail themselves of the benefit of elasticity a public cloud offers.
Ensuring Data Security
The gaps in the current market point to areas which would demand rapid innovation. They are product intelligence, data sharing, visualization and usability. Today teams of programmers, data scientists, and subject matter experts roll their own big data security analytics solution, but few organizations have these resources or budgets. This market reality means that security vendors must fill this hole with canned analytics and algorithms. Data visualization for security remains extremely elementary, dominated by pie charts, graphs, and Excel spread sheet pivot tables. Visualization technology is an emerging area today but there is an increasing amount of research and development happening. Smart security vendors will study these methods and skills and use them as input for future functionality of big data security analytics solutions. Tools that enable security analysts to modify data views and redirect queries with ease will improve upon current open windows investigative tactics. Apart from incident detection and security investigations, there is already big data security analytics product development in other areas such as risk management, regulatory compliance, and fraud detection. It is likely that these kinds of big data security analytics will develop with a mix of real-time and asymmetrical product capabilities..
Guna Sekaran says, “Quantum's solutions have built-in encryption including the ability to do on the fly encryption or encryption at rest, whichever the customer prefers.” Neeraj of Ace-Data says, “Our Data Centre is a tier 3 compliant data center fulfilling the security requirements like biometric access controls, guards etc.”
Quantum's backup appliances have built-in RAID 6 hardware. Moreover, replication to one or more remote targets ensure that even if the primary data is lost due to a natural disaster the copy of the data can be easily restored. In the case of Quantum's vmPRO appliances, no software is even required to restore as the data is stored in its native format. This is particularly useful for quick recovery after a natural disaster.
Neeraj of Ace Data says, “Our tools run background verification checks for all the data that we backup. Apart from the continuous regular checks, we do additionally run data integrity and restore validation processes to ensure that the data is recoverable. All our customers enjoy regular recovery drills of the data and methodology of their choice to ensure data recovery.”
Rajesh Awasthi, Director Telecom & Cloud Service Provider, NetApp India, says “Since we are primarily a storage and data management company, which is where customers keep their data be it enterprise data or business applications they are hosting, their concerns are two-fold basically. As part of infrastructure, one of the things which they want from us from security perspective is that their data should be secure when it is in play (at rest). And when the data is on the move, they should also be secure when they are in the move. When it is stored in the disk drives of the storage system it should be secure. Here NetApp supports encrypted disk drive so the data that get stored on encrypted disk drive is safe. Only those people who are authorized can have access these data.When it comes to data in motion, for SAN Access we have a technology which we license to one of our partners, called Brocade who encrypt the data."
Software Defined Networking
As companies move to a cloud environment, legacy network architectures are buckling under the pressure for instant acc ess to applications and services that offer a high-quality user experience. Organizations also are struggling with the complexity of current data center network fabric designs, which require manual device-by-device configurations and limit the performance of bandwidth-intensive applications.
HP is addressing these challenges with a series of software-defined network (SDN) solutions.
“In the cloud era, clients need a single point of control for the entire network, which enables them to deploy any application or service directly to the user within minutes,” said Prakash Krishnamoorthy, country manager, HP Networking, HP India. “Only HP provides clients with a complete software-defined network solution that automates manual configuration tasks across hardware, software and applications and from data center to desktop through a single control plane.”
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