16 Oct Cybersecurity CEO: The World Will Need To Cyber Protect 100X More Cloud Data by 2021
Secure private and public clouds will wipe out traditional data centers over the next 3-4 years.
– Los Angeles, Calif. – Oct. 16, 2018
The degree of difficulty in protecting businesses from cyber attacks grows in proportion to a number of factors. Emerging threat actors, the prominence of interconnected devices and the most critical in my opinion – the VAST amount of data that needs to be secured – are all adding to this complex challenge.
By 2013, the world was already accumulating data at an astonishing rate of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. At the time, 90 percent of the world’s data had been created in just the two years prior.
Fast-forward to the cloud era, a time in which enterprises and consumers are storing more of their data online. Microsoft helped frame digital growth with its estimate that data volumes online will be 50 times greater in 2020 than they were in 2016. 50x! just think about that for a moment and the impact that volume could have on your business, on your storage, on your security.
Cisco confirmed that cloud data center traffic will represent 95 percent of total data center traffic by 2021. Or to put it another way – cloud computing will wipe out data centers altogether over the next 3-4 years.
Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that the total amount of data stored in the cloud – which includes public clouds operated by vendors and social media companies (think AWS, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), government owned clouds that are accessible to citizens and businesses, and private clouds owned by mid-to-large-sized corporations – will be 100X greater in 2021 than it is today. You read that right – 100X.
To be clear, total data storage is everything digitally generated in the cloud by humans and computers – including IoT devices.
I’m a proponent of cloud in a big way and believe that data stored there is more secure than conventionally stored data.
Cloud computing offers convenience, time to value and flexibility that can’t be offered by traditional servers. I can run a far more efficient practice when I’m maximizing shared workloads than overloading individual computers. It only makes sense and we hear the sports analogies all the time, “Work as a team – share the load etc.” As business leaders, and security practitioners we need to leverage the greatest “team” environment available to us – that’s cloud.
Now committing to the “team” or in this case, the cloud, isn’t enough. We still need to ask ourselves – what model will work for my business? What compliance measures do I need to abide by in the cloud? There are multiple solutions available pending your approach – subscription-based cloud software, platform as a service and overall cloud infrastructure as a service are all on the rise. Same goes for hybrid cloud environments, offered by multiple vendors or a combination of public and private cloud. Then there’s our very favourite decision-making factor – compliance. How do your industry or regional directives treat cloud?
There are still a lot of unknowns in this space but what is clear is that the world’s cloud data is on the rise. Cloud data will multiply 100X over the next 3-4 years and we as business leaders can’t become complacent. Insider threat, ransomware attacks, IoT hacks, exploits in codebases, and other vulnerabilities are staring us in the face – even if we can’t see them. And to be clear – even if the data is in the cloud, it is your responsibility to protect it!
To Your Success,
– Robert Herjavec, founder and CEO at Herjavec Group, and a Shark on ABC’s Shark Tank, provides insights to C-Suite Executives in his Official Blog at Cybercrime Magazine. Herjavec Group is a Managed Security Services Provider with offices and SOCs (Security Operations Centers) globally.
