Cloud computing: You are probably ignoring the biggest security flaw

Even if your code is hacker-proof, there's still one way into your systems and it's much tougher to patch.

There's an ongoing debate about the security implications of using cloud computing services versus running IT systems in-house.

Cloud advocates note that the largest cloud companies will have hundreds, or even thousands, of security staff and the time and money to keep their systems up to date. In contrast, the average enterprise may only have a handful of security staff to cover a wide range of different systems, many of which may be ageing and incapable of being entirely secure. However, some businesses feel more secure holding their critical data themselves rather than trusting it to a cloud company that may spread it across datacenters in different countries.

But however good the systems are, the weak link is always the humans, according to ethical hacker and penetration tester Jamie Woodruff

Equinix Says Hybrid Cloud Is The Future

Global datacenter and networking interconnect provider Equinix EQIX +0.74% is seeing major growth in enterprises moving away from private datacenters and into co-location facilities, particularly those with big, fast, low-latency connections to cloud providers.

It’s a relatively new trend for Equinix, and enterprises are now the company’s fastest growing vertical.

“Much of the traffic of private companies is flowing out, not in,” says Brian Lillie, Global CIO for Equinix. “It’s not flowing to that corporate data-center, it’s flowing out to the Internet, either to cloud services, or just the general Internet.” And he would know. Equinix boasts nearly 170,000 connections between customers, what Lillie terms cross-connects, and being able to see who connects to whom means Equinix can spot trends in the way customers are connecting to each other.

“The other trend we’re seeing is clouds connecting to clouds,” Lillie says, “So this era that you hear people talk about of the multi-cloud is real.”

Equinix are users of cloud computing themselves, for both internal applications and those that are customer facing. “We have maybe fifty to sixty cloud applications that we use to run Equinix,” Lillie says. “If you think of us as a mid-size enterprise in the US, and we’re running that many, yet we’re also running thirty or forty or fifty on-site. So you’re seeing that hybrid cloud is real, and we see that in the connectivity data we have.”

Read More: http://www.forbes.com/sites/justinwarren/2016/03/09/equinix-says-hybrid-cloud-is-the-future/#239b9957a953