The high profile breaches at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Target and Anthem were all attacks on legacy IT systems. If there is one thing these and numerous other security breaches making the news have taught us, it is that individual corporations and government agencies cannot protect their computers nearly as well as cloud providers, and they are only falling further behind.
Resource management
Top-tier cloud providers and their ecosystem can make the investments in people and innovation to keep up with the hackers, and provide businesses with professionally managed information technology.
Not only is cloud computing turning out to be a better model for IT, it is actually reinventing the information security industry by allowing organizations to purchase security capabilities on demand. We call this capability Security-as-a-Service, because it can not only help a corporation secure its headquarters but also extend the same security to branch offices, mobile devices and business partners that never traverse the headquarters.
This doesn’t mean that cloud computing is immune to security breaches. No computer system devised is foolproof. However, the economics driving the cloud make it the only IT sector that can afford to adequately invest in security. Legacy IT is a sitting duck, no matter what compliance mandates we give to a business to improve its security.
