SECURITY AND DATA SOVEREIGNTY IN A MULTICLOUD WORLD
December 2021: another year has passed in a Covid-19-dominated life. We have all become accustomed to a hybrid working style and every company has found its way into it. Practically, everything works, however new challenges are presenting themselves. With much more remote working, IT and user data are increasingly being made accessible simply to be available to employees. In addition, we have become much more dependent on IT than ever before. In this blog, I look at the implications of these developments and also look ahead to the Cloud trends of 2022.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CLOUD SECURITY IN 2022
In 2022, a number of themes will be repeatedly discussed. These are all linked to the theme of security. I expect some major vulnerabilities to be discovered - like the recently released Log4j/Log4s vulnerability - and they will start to have a huge impact on the use of IT from the Cloud. Managed Service Providers will have their hands full patching and mitigating the impact of these types of vulnerabilities and associated attacks.
Such occurrences are a great stimulus for themes regarding continuity. What about backups and a fallback scenario? And how do we ensure that, in the event of a successful hack, a company can keep working? But besides being able to continue working, we also need to look at the front end to see what a company's defences are. What resilience measures are available? In short, data security is getting much more focus on IT departments within companies.
Our customers, partners and we ourselves are focusing a lot of attention on all layers of IT services to increase resilience. In addition to firewalls, virus scanners and backups, services such as vulnerability scans on both production and backup data, are going to play a much more prominent role in the conversation about IT.
SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE
Then there is the role of the Cloud itself. A lot of companies have switched to a Software as a Service service from a public Cloud, with Microsoft with its Microsoft365 proposition being the common example. This trend also continues: more and more services and applications used within organisations are consumed in easy to use (read from a public Cloud).
At Fundaments, we see that our Independent Software Vendors also want to develop at an increasing pace in that Software as a Service world. They also want to do this by being able to develop applications by dividing them into microservices. This scalable way of working requires development in the hosting platform: Kubernetes is a much-heard answer to this. We are therefore on the verge of an implementation in a new platform, where all Fundaments components, on being able to host mission critical applications, are also embedded in this platform. And that completely scalable, hosted in the Netherlands and completely unburdened as well as supported with a 24x7 service.
In the ease of Software as a Service from the public Cloud, I often hear an assumption that it is always secure. Here also comes a piece of awareness: is there even a backup of that data, e.g. of my Microsoft365 applications? And what data do I actually store in a public Cloud? In that light, we are going to hear more about data sovereignty. Data classification coupled with the way it is handled is developing into guidelines that e.g. organisations and governments are using even more strictly. This leads to a nice balance between the hyperscaler (Azure, Google and AWS) and parties offering a private Cloud such as Fundaments. In doing so, companies are also increasingly opting for a hybrid Cloud and bringing nuance to a Cloud-first strategy: because which Cloud is actually being referred to?
DATA IS THE NEW GOLD
All the trends and measures mentioned above ultimately revolve around only one thing: data and protecting it with measures around availability and access. It is good to realise that data is our new gold and that in 2022, such data can make or break an organisation. Based on this realisation, in 2022 Fundaments will again focus on improving processes even further and adding even more services and tools to protect and manage the data in every possible way.
I wish you a very healthy and secure 2022!
