Although cloud has been on the rise for years, it’s not reached a plateau. A poll of IT senior executives shows adoption will continue to grow in 2016. While some enterprises are adding security, US federal CIO Tony Scott says there is nothing safer. But CIOs are smart to work with security-focused providers.

• Cloud Building Regardless of Security Concerns
• Drop In Shadow IT Worries Coincides with Cloud-First Policies
• US CIO Tony Scott Praises Cloud Security
• IT Leadership Responsibilities
• The Internet of Things
• Top Security Meets Top Performance

Cloud Building Regardless of Security Concerns

Most chief information officers will be prioritizing cloud for enterprise systems in 2016, indicates a poll featured in CIO. The survey of just under 100 technology chiefs was conducted at a Gartner-sponsored tradeshow in October 2015.

Cloud software allowed organizations to trim their budgets this year, according to 50% of respondents. Momentum to the cloud continues to grow, with IT pros typically coupling distributed virtual systems with cloud security: three in four (77%) said they would invest more in cloud security to support their systems. About a third of CIOs said that they would be bumping up the amount spent on cloud security by over 20%.

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Top challenges mentioned by tech leaders were:

• Preventing unauthorized downloads – 36%
• Understanding security of individual providers – 24%
• Sharing outside the company – 21%
• Shadow IT – 14%

Drop In Shadow IT Worries Coincides with Cloud-First Policies

The diminishing relevance of shadow IT as a concern is essentially because organizations realized employees simply needed IT to give them better tools, explained security marketing VP Rich Campagna. “As the cloud-first mindset has become more commonplace, security concerns have shifted to topics like access from unmanaged devices and external sharing,” he said.

Using applications secretly and without the knowledge of the IT department is not occurring as often because of the cloud-first mentality, which means that enterprises have moved on from asking why they should use cloud to assuming cloud is the best choice upfront.

Nonetheless, security should always be paramount when looking for a cloud provider, commented Superb Internet Marketing Manager Quincy Solano. “Think about cloud platforms that paved the way for a cloud-first mindset: DropBox, Google DOCS/Drive and SaaS sites,” he said. “These applications made it easy to upload sensitive information where security isn’t 100% known by the user (what the security does vs. how the security works).  This then lends itself for the users to think, ‘How safe is my sensitive information?’”

“That is why having a cloud hosting service that is solid in its security is paramount, along with the security measures taken by the company providing the cloud service,” Solano added. “It’s becoming, much like the cloud-first mindset, a regular practice in the industry.”

US CIO Tony Scott Praises Cloud Security

While enterprise CIOs were expressing their confidence in further cloud adoption but hedging their bets with security funds, the top federal IT official noted that cloud is safer than any other alternative.

Federal CIO Tony Scott compared a well-designed cloud to a financial institution. “They have the incentive, they have skills and abilities, and they have the motivation to do a much better job of security than any one company or any one organization can probably do,” he said.

While the federal government will continue to develop a stronger security stance, the best cloud infrastructure companies have already achieved that evolution, Scott noted. Along with scalability, the issue of data safety is making cloud the obvious choice.

Scott argued that companies should move their systems to cloud as soon as they can since doing so will undoubtedly reduce their risk vs. on-premises solutions.

Scott, who has held his role for under 12 months, has focused on getting federal departments to migrate to cloud, as well as institute more advanced administrative and operational processes. He essentially wants agencies to run as smoothly as the systems provided by infrastructure-as-a-service experts.

IT Leadership Responsibilities

The federal government, like industry, is adapting to better meet the needs of the information age. Responsibilities as an information chief are changing too, with cloud central to the new era of IT.

Scott commented that IT leaders shouldn’t just be focused on technology but on mentoring and building the capabilities of the IT staff. “It’s not good enough just to be somebody who’s smart about how to develop, install systems or manage applications,” he said. “I think the [CIO] role is evolving also to be a developer of talent.”

The Internet of Things

Finally, with the cloud and the general emergence of the third platform, CIOs will be able to access data from much more diverse sources through the Internet of Things. Over the next decade or decade and a half, Scott thinks that the value of IoT will become much more apparent both economically and in the quality of our day-to-day lives.

Top Performance Meets Top Security

Companies that move to the cloud want to have the best of both worlds – incredible performance in a safe data environment.

Superb Internet is the best choice for performance. First, we use distributed rather than centralized storage. That allows us to provide you with systems that are preferable in many ways to those offered by most cloud providers. When storage is distributed, there is no single point of failure. Even if multiple nodes fail, your performance will not take a hit. Second, we use InfiniBand networking technology, which beats the pants off 10 Gigabit Ethernet with dozens of times lower latency and zero packet loss.

But are we secure? Yes, and we can prove it, with numerous third-party assessments, such as SSAE-16 Soc-1 Type II auditing, ISO 27001:2013 & ISO 9001:2008 certification, and FISMA / HIPAA / PCI compliance.