Thursday 19 November 2015

The US government wants in on the public cloud, but needs more transparency

The U.S. federal government is trying to move more into the cloud, but service providers' lack of transparency is harming adoption, according to Arlette Hart, the FBI's chief information security officer.

"There's a big piece of cloud that's the 'trust me' model of cloud computing," she said during an on-stage interview at the Structure conference in San Francisco Wednesday.

That's a tough sell for organizations like the federal government that have to worry about protecting important data. While Hart said that the federal government wants to get at the "enormous value" in public cloud infrastructure, its interest in moving to public cloud infrastructure is also tied to a need for greater security.

While major providers like Amazon and Microsoft offer tools that meet the U.S. government's regulations, not every cloud provider is set up along those lines. In Hart's view, cloud providers need to be more transparent about what they do with security so the government and other customers can verify that their practices are sufficient for protecting data.

Companies that experience security breaches in the cloud may be most concerned about monetary losses as the result of a breach, but Hart pointed out that the federal government isn't as much concerned about money as it is about securing data that can literally be a matter of national security.

Read More: http://www.cio.com/article/3005946/the-us-government-wants-in-on-the-public-cloud-but-needs-more-transparency.html

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