Weekly CloudNews: The Importance of Continuous Cloud Security

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

• Why Sustainability Matters in the New Cloud Order

With that, onto this week’s news:

Move faster with continuous security scanning in the cloud 

David Lithicum, InfoWorld, Sept. 24, 2021

“These days cloud application developers are also security engineers. Who did not see this coming, given that application-level security is no longer an option? Also, we are pushing developers to build applications at scale, meaning they are becoming ops engineers and database engineers as well as security engineers, which is scary.

The fact that most developers are not security experts is not lost on me. This has led to devsecops practices where developers are given training, tools, and processes to build and deploy more secure cloud-based applications. Of course, anyone who has attempted to implement that kind of cultural change has found that it can’t be done in weeks. It takes months and sometimes years. Emerging concepts out there may help things along. Cloud-native application protection (CNAP) platforms can continuously scan workloads and configurations to find and resolve security issues. They do this during application development, application testing, and application deployment.”

Not Optimizing Cloud Computing Spend Costs Enterprises $24B

Sean Michael Kerner, ITProToday, Sept. 22, 2021 

“Organizations around the world are not properly optimizing cloud spend to the tune of $24B in missed savings, according to new research from S&P Global Market Intelligence’s 451 Research. There are myriad options for organizations in terms of different options for cloud resources, with some being more expensive than others. Of note, the report found that 36% of organizations are paying for cloud resources at on-demand rates, as opposed to other cost effective options that are less expensive, such as reserved instance pricing. According to the report, only 17% of organizations are currently using hybrid or multi-cloud approaches to mix providers to deliver the same application. According to Rogers, by using a multi-cloud approach for an application, it is possible for an organization to optimize costs.

​​Improving cloud cost optimization isn’t just about reducing costs. Rogers noted that cloud costs go up for two reasons – either organizations are consuming more resources to deliver business value, or they are accidentally consuming more because of poor governance. He emphasized that if cloud costs are growing to improve business value , that isn’t necessarily a problem, because if the organization is getting more revenue as a result then the additional cost of cloud doesn’t really matter.”

Google, AWS, IBM, Microsoft and Morgan Stanley partner for a new cloud data framework

Jonathan Greig, ZDNet, Sept. 28, 2021

“Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, Microsoft and other major tech giants have joined forces with the EDM Council — a cross-industry trade association for data management and analytics — to create the Cloud Data Management Capabilities (CDMC) framework. More than 100 companies worked on the project, which involved developing a comprehensive set of cloud data management capabilities, standards and best practices for cloud, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud implementations while also incorporating automated key controls for protecting sensitive data.

‘The EDM Council is honored to have facilitated the development of the CDMC framework to provide an auditable and certified cloud data management best practice available as a free license for all industries,’ said John Bottega, the president of the EDM Council. The CDMC was initially developed with the financial sector in mind but was expanded to include every industry. Evren Eryurek, the director of product management for data analytics at Google Cloud, said cloud acceleration has skyrocketed as companies of all sizes and industries become more reliant on data to drive transformation, forcing businesses to adapt quickly.”

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