Cybersecurity Threats Driving Businesses to the Cloud, Says Josh Greenbaum, Speaker at IEEE Computer Society's Rock Stars of Cybersecurity Threats and Countermeasures

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Jul 13, 2016, 04:00 ET

SEATTLE and LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., July 13, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- "Cybersecurity is a cat and mouse game where the mouse gets bigger and more ferocious by the minute," stated Joshua Greenbaum, analyst, Enterprise Applications Consulting, in his discussion of the topics to be addressed at the upcoming Rock Stars of Cybersecurity Threats and Countermeasures, September 13, 2016, in Seattle. "Security threats can't be minimized. That's why companies of all sizes are running to the cloud."

According to Greenbaum, the threat comes from a combination of internal negligence and abuse, external competitors and industrial espionage, and external governments, sabotage and espionage – all overwhelming problems to a small or mid-sized business, but also damaging to large businesses, as evidenced by recent high-profile security breaches. Ransomware is the new game in town. It's costly, and can be a real threat to business continuity. Meanwhile, hiring the right cybersecurity experts is getting harder and harder, and the demand for increasingly complex countermeasures is making the overall cost of maintaining a top-notch cybersecurity presence out of reach for many companies. Even companies in tech centers like Silicon Valley are finding it hard to hire the best talent, which is being drawn off to startups and other more lucrative opportunities.

Meanwhile, top cloud companies – Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (AWS), Google and others – are able to attract cybersecurity talent, and because this talent is applied to all cloud customers, their value accrues across a wider set of companies. The ability to monitor so many companies – including sign-ons, transactions and data usage, and interactions with customers – at once gives cloud vendors the ability to be more comprehensive in their threat detection and remediation.

Greenbaum adds, "Security issues aren't the only driving factor in cloud migration for businesses. We also consider elastic resources, high availability and redundancy/fail over, better lifecycle management, the ability to include it in the operations budget instead of making massive capital expenses, and the fact that all the latest and greatest versions of enterprise software now run in the cloud. However, when you add the cybersecurity benefits to these other advantages, it tips the scale for businesses. For many companies, this cybersecurity issue is the deciding factor in moving to the cloud."

As part of Rock Stars of Cybersecurity Threats and Countermeasures, Greenbaum will head a panel of experts to discuss, Ensuring Cybersecurity Success in an Insecure World. He describes the panel like this –

Security has rapidly moved from the back office to the C-suite as a major operational and business issue. As the arms race to build better tools and processes to safeguard corporate and personal assets continues, understanding the right mix of new technology and new business security practices has become an essential part of every company's cybersecurity planning. This panel will help decision-makers understand how to make these monumental shifts as successfully and painlessly as possible, and what needs to be done to ensure the right mix of security and operational flexibility in an increasingly insecure world.

Additional information and registration for this event can be found here.

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SOURCE IEEE Computer Society