For most enterprises, cost savings and increased efficiencies are the primary motivations for making the move to cloud computing. But recent studies from Gartner and other firms have identified concerns over cloud security and data privacy as being the leading barriers to cloud adoption. In this piece, Ron Ross of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Purdue University professor, Eugene Spafford, discussed the question of whether adopting the cloud actually brings more or less risk to an enterprise.
Ron Ross’s belief is that a portion of an enterprise’s operational complexities can be mediated by moving certain types of data to the cloud. He specifically believes that when a company is able to classify data as critical versus not as sensitive, it helps organizations identify what data can be moved to the cloud without the same level of concern over security. Moving less sensitive data off premise reduces complexity by decreasing the data the enterprise must manage and secure internally. This shift in data storage essentially puts the security concerns on the public cloud provider and removes it from the organization.