Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Peter Martini, co-founder and president of iboss
GDPR Will Not Hinder Cloud Security Leaders
Although GDPR is focused on protecting the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of European Union citizens, these regulations bring to heel countless businesses from stateside and abroad, as all organizations that provide goods or services to individuals within the Union are obliged to comply.
By 2017, the laws that GDPR replaced had become extremely outdated. Thus, businesses took it upon themselves to defend their data, with many on-premises appliance-based security solutions stepping up to meet the demand. Although effective for a short time, this model has now become unsustainable.
In 2019, we will continue to accelerate along a trajectory begun years ago: companies and organizations will outgrow their traditional networks. The shift of apps and services to the cloud has grown bandwidth consumption exponentially; meanwhile, a rise in employee mobility has necessitated the backhauling of more data than ever to headquarters for inspection. As a result, the hardware and backhaul channels that we’ve traditionally relied on are overburdened and costing companies a fortune to scale and maintain.
The answer to this problem lies in the cloud with solutions that can scale infinitely and remove hardware from the equation, saving companies IT labor and money. 2019 will see appliance-based cybersecurity solutions struggling desperately to keep up with a just a few forward-thinking cloud security providers. IT professionals may remain skeptical that an off-premises security solution can provide the features they need to stay compliant and profitable, but the most capable cloud solutions won’t be strained or disrupted at all by GDPR. Rather, they will work easily within regulations to secure remote users, offer complete control of where data is inspected and stored, and eliminate costly and needy hardware.
Some chief concerns of GDPR are malware defense and data loss prevention, rapid granular and reporting, and geographic compartmentalization of data.
Malware defense and data loss prevention are easily addressed by cloud solutions. Cloud-based architecture eases the incorporation of third-party inspection engines and threat databases which are, regardless of any platform’s claims, more focused and effective than that platform’s base offering. Cloud infrastructure can also offer critical integrations with the most popular cloud apps like Office 365. The advent of security via the cloud even allows for telecom giants and ISPs to provide organizations with protection baked right into the service they’re already receiving.
Agile reporting of highly granular network activity is also a key concern of GDPR. Companies must be able to disclose certain information about breaches within just hours of their occurrence. A strong cloud architecture enables organizations to monitor nearly every aspect of network traffic-including sources, destinations, timestamps, content type, transmission lengths, request method, etc.-and log, sort, and recall it all instantly via search without concern for hardware.
In terms of geographic compartmentalization, cloud-based security gets a bad rap. While one of the key benefits of cloud solutions (for security or otherwise) is that companies need not worry about on-premises appliances, users and administrators don’t necessarily know where that hardware is. This presents a problem when regulations dictate where PII must reside. Next-generation cloud architectures, however, are built on containerized gateways, which can address the concerns of GDPR with respect to where data travels and resides. Top cloud gateway solutions have the multinational data center presence to handle customer needs, robust controls that allow admins to define geographic zones, and the architecture to ensure data is inspected efficiently without crossing borders.
While GDPR does ultimately require companies to keep a tighter handle on their online activity, it is the traditional appliance-based security solutions that ought to be worried, not those in the cloud.
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About the Author
As president and co-founder of iboss, Peter Martini has played a major role in developing iboss’ innovative technology, and has helped shepherd iboss’ phenomenal growth, since its founding. He has been awarded dozens of patents focused on network and mobile security, and with his brother, has been recognized by the industry with several prestigious awards, including, Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year and one of Goldman Sachs 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs. More recently, iboss was ranked number three for security companies in the Deloitte Fast 500.
