Cloud computing is changing the enterprise landscape

At the RSA Conference Europe 2009, Qualys CEO Philippe Courtot gave an overview about how cloud computing is changing the enterprise security landscape.

Mr. Courtot demonstrated how it’s becoming harder to secure the enterprise despite all the advancements achieved by the information security. This is not surprising since the bad guys have evolved with the industry, and most of the time they are the ones dictating what areas need attention and increased control. Some of the problems are old but still difficult to solve:

• More than 50% of data residing on corporate networks is not in a secure environment.
• One in ten company computers is going to be stolen or misplaced in a year. It will probably lack encryption.
• It takes 29.5 days on average to eliminate half of the known critical vulnerabilities on corporate networks.

The Qualys CEO put it like this: “Cloud computing fundamentally satisfies the needs for the agile 21st century corporations which have to move fast to react to the global competition.”

The information security industry is evolving from being a product industry to being a service industry, and this has profound implications about how everybody is going to operate in the future. Cloud computing is one of the answers to a series of challenges, so let’s just hope we can keep it secure.

For a bit of technical information related to cloud computing security listen to our podcast with Craig Balding.