Cloud security: Better than we thought?

More and more experts think the cloud is actually safer than the traditional environment. They are not cloud suppliers or marketing or entrepreneurship to put the plug on the cloud. They are some of the government senior-most technical officials, including from the intelligence department and the Army, which may finally be the conversation you expect.

The executive touts the list of security advantages including cloud Federal CIO Steven, NSA and American network command President Kess Alexander, CIA cto,nist security researcher Peter Fragrance and Ronald Former security director Ross.

Their comments on cloud security are usually accompanied by a warning: "If you are right." "In other words, cloud security only appears to be combined with vigilance, best practices, technical information, including encryption, patching and monitoring."

The transfer cloud is an opportunity to reassess cloud security from the ground up, the network and data center gaps, and the shutdown. The federal government's help agency is like this with an increasing number of guidelines such as NIST's 68-page file, requiring control of cloud security as part of the security authorization program coming up.

The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) talks about and periodically automatically moves workloads with new machines to create a "polymorphic attack surface" because they don't know what is running at their physical servers at any point in time.

Hunter is not very lightweight, and the CIA is not trying to solve the security problems of data and systems. "We are delusional for one reason," Hunter said in the Time magazine October 2011 event. I'm not joking, anyone who leaks the secret out will die. ”

Alexander says cloud computing can improve other benefits across the network. "Better visibility and situational awareness," he said at a recent event hosted by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Program. "More importantly, today if you see how we launch [patch], you will laugh or cry because it takes months." We need to do it dynamically, and the cloud lets us do it faster. ”

These concepts apply primarily to cloud secrecy. Even so, FedRAMP, one of the creators of the federal Risk and authorization management system, NIST ' smell believes that the government's commissioned data on Amazon's world-class engineers, Google, and Microsoft may be more secure data than hosting their own data centers.

Of course, not everyone is prepared to buy this idea. In Baltimore's latest cybersecurity incident, some participants derided Alexander for assuming cloud security. They also consolidate virtualization technologies that may make an IT environment easier, but they also create larger social engineering goals and other forms of attack.

With the National Standards and Technology Association, the researchers, despite their cloud optimism, offer their own words of caution. The cloud computing environment presents unique security challenges, written in its recently released US "Cloud Roadmap" file. "Architecture, potential scale, reliance on networks, degree of outsourcing, and the cloud computing model of shared resources make it a prudent re-examination of current security controls." IT professionals, not paying attention to security controls.

However, the cloud may be more secure than the legacy data center. This is the view of government intelligence, defense and the influential leaders of civil institutions. Maybe it's time to think more about the potential security benefits than just all the wrong ways to go.