Cloud-based platforms are on the rise. More and more businesses worldwide are moving their operations into public and private cloud servers – but there are still some who question its security and safety amid an evolving landscape of cyber risk.
Results of a recent survey by LogicMonitor suggest that 83% of enterprise workloads will be
conducted in the cloud by 2020. Of that figure, 41% are likely to run on public cloud platforms like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud, 20% are expected to use private cloud-based platforms, and the final 22% are predicted to go hybrid.
This predicted take-up consists of companies convinced by the cloud’s potential, but there are considerable sceptics who are concerned about the cloud as a potential aggregation of risk, and who would rather develop internal and on-premise IT solutions.
Bruno Fiastre, EVP of investment software solution provider Taliance, is on a campaign to get investment managers to shift everything into the cloud. He claims his experience setting up systems for some of the largest asset managers in the world has shown the cloud is safer, more flexible and easier to use than on-premise alternatives.
Cloud-based solutions offer a “dynamic approach to risk” as opposed to the sometimes “monolete” legacy systems used internally by certain businesses, according to Fiastre. The cloud has been around for approximately 10 years and has received extensive investment, security updates and infrastructure developments in that time.
“Businesses need to look at the true capabilities of the cloud and ask themselves if they can beat it with on-premises solutions,” Fiastre told
Insurance Business. “They need to question whether they can provide the same level of knowledge, security, technology and power with an internal, on-premise solution.”
Fiastre’s passion for cloud-based solutions was spurred on last summer when the NotPetya ransomware attack left numerous companies “absolutely paralyzed”. Some of the worst hit enterprises had on-premise solutions rather than cloud-based operations. Running a business via one internal location is a great risk – whether in cloud or on-premise.
“On the one hand, it’s true that the cloud could become a potential aggregation of risk. If you keep everything in one place, whether it’s in the cloud or on-premise, it’s inherently risky,” Fiastre explained. “But the cloud is an excellent way to spread risk. Company IT should be run through various cloud systems in order to mitigate systemic loss potential.
“The spreading of risk can and should be applied to IT systems. Clients who use a number of different systems, technologies and cloud infrastructures can significantly reduce their
cybersecurity risks. If you’re unlucky, one cloud could go down, but it’s unlikely the remaining four or five in use by a cyber-smart company will be hit at the same time.”
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