Speaking as a Member of the Village

Ron Miller recently wrote an article on TechCrunch titled “It Really Does Take a Village to Keep you Secure in the Cloud” that struck a chord with me.  In his article, Ron discussed the cloud shared responsibility model and the importance of us all taking steps to ensure the security and persistence of our data. I appreciate his view of the cloud computing community as a village and the opportunity to consider everyone’s part in it. How can we help each other? How can we make this village better?

Thinking about the cloud computing community as a village; an interdependent network of individuals within a given space.  Individual members have their own specializations but many have overlapping needs for which it may not be feasible to be self-sufficient. You might have a farmer, a blacksmith and a shoemaker.  The farmer doesn’t make his own tools and shoes, because it would cause him to neglect the farm. Instead he gets them from the blacksmith and the shoemaker.  As members of the cloud computing village, we also want to focus on our specializations, making them the best they can be, and relying on other members of the village for the other things we need.

Ron paraphrases AWS Chief Security Officer Steve Schmidt saying “AWS is a target. It has to deal with millions of events every month, most of which we (cloud consumers) never hear about.”  With AWS’s security team monitoring their services and Security Guardians embedded in each service development team, it’s safe to say that AWS is doing their part. But as Steve Schmidt states, AWS data is targeted by bad actors. So what about the rest of us in the shared responsibility model? What is our responsibility and what do we need from each other? As Ron states, “Security is such a complex undertaking that no one entity can be responsible for keeping a system safe, especially when user error at any level can leave a system vulnerable to clever hackers. There have to be communication channels across every level of the organization, with customers and with concerned third parties.”

Preventative security measures are an important part of everyone’s responsibility, and there are other village members who can help with that part of your security stance.  But experts agree that when it comes to data breaches, ransomware and insider threats, it’s not a matter of if, but when. This makes it imperative to ensure your data is backed up outside your account and control access domain.  Clumio provides an important part of keeping the village safe by offering its members turnkey, air gapped, immutable data protection. We use the power of the cloud to power incredible scale and speed within a secure, simple, intuitive backup and recovery solution that frees up your time for creating your own innovations. We know how important security is, so we’ve built in security features like SSO, MFA, end-to-end encryption with BYOK, access controls and more.

Clumio is glad to be part of the cloud computing village and doing our part to help keep villagers’ data safe. If you’d like to learn more, visit Clumio.com or Start a 30-day free Trial.