Cybersecurity is a broad topic, and as such there are many facets a company must understand to properly implement it into your business. This article is the first part in a series that will cover how to properly manage your risks in the cloud, read part two.
The great migration
While the idea of cloud-hosted infrastructure may seem new, organizations have been outsourcing management of their infrastructure for decades. Organizations that no longer wanted to manage the physical aspects of their computing and network infrastructure moved to outsourced datacenters that co-located their infrastructure with other customers separated by metal cages. While the organization retained responsibility for the management of their own servers, they no longer needed to focus on the day-to-day administration of internet connectivity, power, back-up generators and physically securing the data center facility.
As technology companies saw their demands for computing resources exponentially escalating, a new business opportunity arose. Technology companies could plan and build far greater capacity than they needed, then sell that excess capacity to other organizations – a concept now known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions. Organizations could purchase on-demand computing and network resources without building their own on-site data center or committing to a long-term co-location agreement. Thus, the great migration to the cloud began.
Understanding the cloud’s unique capabilities
There is a multitude of aspects to cloud-based services; we outline three of the greatest and most unique capabilities below:
- Invisible hardware – When you setup your cloud account, what may seem strange at first is that the hardware layer to building a data center has become invisible. You still must select the computing specs for your server (number of CPU cores, GB of RAM), but you do so within a web interface that automatically builds your server. It is the same when you select your storage capacity; once selected, it is provisioned automatically to your server instance through the invisible hands of your cloud provider’s backend management services. What used to entail racking-and-stacking of multiple, different physical components now all occurs after a few drop-down selections. The physical aspect of data center operations now becomes invisible to the end user.
