Businesses are much earlier in their cloud adoption journey than hype would suggest, according to a security expert.
Many find that once they have virtualised their IT as part of their move to the cloud, they suddenly face the security hurdle, he said.
“There is nowhere near as much movement to the cloud as the hype would suggest because two things are missing – security and SLAs (Service Level Agreements),” Andy Dancer, chief technology officer of IT security firm Trend Micro EMEA, told Computerworld UK at VMworld in Copenhagen.
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Dancer claimed that most cloud providers are more concerned with providing the cheapest service rather than the resilience and reliability that businesses are really after.
He added: “We see a massive amount of virtualisation happening at the early stages. The first thing they [organisations] do is take everything they have and make it virtual. Then they get stuck.
“They are making everything virtual and [only then] looking where to put the security.”
Dancer said that the key to addressing the security concerns is to embed it early in the journey to the cloud.
“Get the security right from the beginning – within your own physical environment, before, or as, you virtualise,” he advised.
Despite the fast-growing prevalence of mobile devices in the enterprise, from smartphones to tablets like the Apple iPhone and iPad, Dancer said that the management of consumerisation is also still in its early stages.
“People are now connecting their own devices to the corporate network, but most people are scrabbling, looking for the right [security] solution. They don’t want yet another product and yet another management console. It shouldn’t matter what endpoints [there are],” he said.
As for the future, Dancer believes that IT managers will be looking to simplify the management of their infrastructure, which will become more complicated through consumerisation, virtualisation and cloud.
To this end, dashboards and information management will become particularly important to IT managers to gain control of this new environment, he said.
