ENTERPRISE ADOPTION OF PUBLIC CLOUD continues to leap ahead, with Gartner forecasting global spending on infra-structure as a service (IaaS) to grow nearly 40% this year. But public cloud isn’t the answer to every problem, and in some cases, it never will be.
Some regulated industries may never move their mission- critical applications to the public cloud, because of data locality, ownership, privacy, and other requirements. Latency- sensitive applications may also need to stay in an on-premises data center, because of the inherent limitations of long- distance networks.
Public cloud presents particular challenges to regulated industries. Restrictions may apply regarding where data is physically located, who can access it, and how it is governed. Privacy laws apply in some jurisdictions, as do rules about specific forms of encryption and data protection. In addition, there have been numerous recent incidents of data’s being inadvertently left in the open due to human errors such as misconfiguring cloud servers or making simple mistakes. Such oversights are among the biggest sources of cloud-based data exposure, accounting for 82% of vulnerabilities analyzed by security software vendor
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