The public Cloud is more secure than an in-house data-center

Business IT Nerd wrote an essay to proof that the public Cloud is more secure than an in-house data-center – even for sensitive (financial) information. The essay was the final assignment of the masterclass Cloud. The goal of this essay was to convince a number of senior managers from a financial organization to approve the movement of a critical application to the public cloud.

Goals

Main reasons was to overcome a lot of technical and organizational limitations and to use the cloud capabilities to the fullest potential.

Support the goals

The following aspects were taken into account to strengthen the statement:

  • Acknowledge financial organizations like banks have a hard time putting their financial information outside their own data-center.
  • The impact of physical security aspects on the information in the cloud.
  • The impact of application security as part of the strategy to move applications to the cloud.
  • An overview of the various categories of cloud security aspects.
  • The impact of human failure on the (potential) loss of valuable information.
  • The role of governance when considering putting sensitive information in the cloud.
  • Thread analysis – both internal as well as external threads.
  • A number of recent cases in which sensitive information was compromised and what the lessons learned are. Provide practical advice on how to mitigate any cases like this.
  • The options of public cloud to implement high availability, fail over, encryption, key management, etc.

Business decisions

As soon as the essay was finished and distributed it led to a number of discussions and debate which contributed to the goal stated above. The discussion was not just a technical discussion – it helped the senior managers since it contained practical advice and guidelines. They were being able to decide based on this essay and the critical application is now in the public cloud. All major technical issues are long gone and also the organizational aspects are history.

Your cloud strategy

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