Cloud security and concerns around it have dominated conversations about cloud adoption, with a recent study from Ingram Micro revealing that it’s a top concern for 83% of organisations looking for a cloud solution.

But as the technology available advances, cloud suppliers are able to use the industry’s most sophisticated security solutions to protect data, and are able to justify investment in top-level security to protect a wide range of customers.

Of course, not all cloud solutions support the same level of security. So what should organisations be looking out for when exploring all the functions offered by vendors to ensure they get the best level of security?

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Here are three things to look out for before committing to that cloud contract.

Information access

The first thing to check for is the solution’s ability to share information across departments. This functionality is key to CIOs looking to transform the business by improving customer experience, improving organisational agility and introducing new digital revenue streams.

Corporations run hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of interconnected applications to support their operations. Traditional solutions stored information in many different places, so keeping those systems in sync was a challenging task.

True, multi-tenancy SaaS makes all of this much easier, with human resource, finance and planning data stored in one application. This central design has many benefits, with all systems working from a common framework, so there are no inconsistencies in data. It also eradicates the disconnect between the system and its users, a problem prevalent in many legacy systems.

Consequently, security improves with a single version of the software that is continuously updated, scanned and patched. This is much better than working with multiple solutions, and any security-related changes to the system architecture is relayed to all customers simultaneously. If a leading enterprise needs a stringent new security feature, it is available to an SMB as well.

Encryption benefits

In the old days, corporations relied on firewalls to protect information, thinking that once the business had warded off outsiders, information was safe. Such thinking is now very outdated, with hackers able to attack systems at different levels. Once in a system, they stay, often working their way from low-level to high-level security clearances and compromising sensitive information.

One way firms can protect themselves is through encryption. Typically, data is encrypted in transit, which is a first rather than a last step. Once information enters the data centre, it is unencrypted and therefore vulnerable. To address this problem, organisations need to encrypt information at rest in a persistent data store.

Unfortunately, cloud services built on legacy architectures rarely support the encryption of all customer data at rest because encryption solutions are complex and difficult to implement.

With modern cloud architectures, a good cloud vendor will take on those responsibilities, especially if privacy and security are embedded into the solution’s system right from the start.

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Support for third-party standards

Industry and government groups have designed various compliance frameworks to protect customer information, such as the GDPR coming into force in just a few weeks. However, the specifications are only a starting point.

While assessing a solution, the various compliance standards and security implementations should be thoroughly examined. Is the service simply aligned with the standard or has the service been certified? How is the information stored? What level of encryption is supported? How are updates handled?

All cloud providers claim to have secure systems, but few offer the higher levels of protection needed with an enterprise’s valuable data. Carefully examining a vendor’s solution, however good it may seem on the surface, is key to a breach-free, compliant cloud future.

Gartner predicts the top 10 cloud providers will account for 70% of IaaS revenues in the next three years, with the likes of AWS, Microsoft, Google and Rackspace dominating the leaderboard more than ever.

These top 10 firms took 50% of the market in 2017, according to Gartner’s Forecast Analysis: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 4Q17 Update, and Gartner suggested that the smaller players stand little chance against the big boys, with the larger firms in danger of getting «unchecked influence» over users as a result.

«The increasing dominance of the hyperscale IaaS providers creates both enormous opportunities and challenges for end users and other market participants,» said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner.

«While it enables efficiencies and cost benefits, organizations need to be cautious about IaaS providers potentially gaining unchecked influence over customers and the market,» Nag explained.

He added that organisations will demand more from IaaS providers, particularly around the ease with which they can switch between multiple clouds, rather than focusing on one supplier. They will look to form alliances with the vendors that allow for multicloud agreements, rather than those that penalise users that have more than one supplier.

As more businesses realise the benefits of the cloud, they are becoming more demanding across the board, Nag added. This has already become apparent in the SaaS market, which is expected to grow revenues by 22% this year to $73.6 billion – the largest cloud segment, where firms want tools that specifically align to ther business objectives, rather than being a one-size-fits-all offering.

«In many areas, SaaS has become the preferred delivery model,» said Nag. «Now SaaS users are increasingly demanding more purpose-built offerings engineered to deliver specific business outcomes.»

Elsewhere IaaS is expected to grow by a third to hit $40.8 billion in revenue in 2018, and PaaS to reach $15 billion.

In the PaaS sector, database platform as a service (dbPaaS) is the fastest growing sector, with hyperscale cloud providers snapping up the opportunity to diversify their services.

«Although these large vendors have different strengths, and customers generally feel comfortable that they will be able to meet their current and future needs, other dbPaaS offerings may be good choices for organizations looking to avoid lock-in,» Nag added.

Picture: Shutterstock

Cloud-based AI services continue to grow in popularity, thanks to their low cost, easy-to-use integration and potential to create complex services.

In the words of Daniel Hulme, senior research associate at UCL, «cloud-based solutions are cheaper, more flexible and more secure» than anything else on the market.

By 2020 it’s believed that as many as 60% of personal technology device vendors will be using third-party AI cloud services to enhance the features they offer in their products. However, we’re also likely to see a significant growth of cloud-based AI services in the business sector.

One of the biggest drivers of this has been the proliferation of VPAs in the consumer space, made popular by the development of smart speakers by the likes of Amazon and Google.

Users have quickly adopted the technology into their everyday lives, and businesses were quick to realise the potential locked away in these devices, particularly when it comes to delivering new products.

Drivers of cloud-based AI services

Amazon’s Alexa was the first personal assistant to achieve mass-market appeal

«It’s a confluence of factors,» says Philip Carnelley, AVP Enterprise Software Group at analyst firm IDC. «There is no doubt the consumer experience of using Alexa, Siri and Google Now has helped familiarise businesses with the power of AI.

«But there is also a lot of publicity around AI achievements, like DeepMind’s game-winning efforts – AlphaGo winning against the Go champion for example – or Microsoft’s breakthrough efforts in speech recognition.

He adds that improvements to the underlying platforms, such as the greater availability of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and new developments in graphical processing units, are making the whole package more cost-effective.

Yet, it’s important to remember that despite there being so much activity in the sector, the technology is still in its infancy.

«AI is still very much a developing market,» says Alan Priestley, research director for technology and service partners at Gartner. «We’re in the very early stages. People are currently building and training AI models, or algorithms, to attempt to do what the human brain does, which is analyse natural content.»

The likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook are leading this early development precisely because they have so much untapped data at their disposal, he adds.

The role of the cloud

Vendors have helped drive AI concepts thanks to open source code

The cloud has become an integral part of this development, primarily because of the vast computing resources at a company’s disposal.

«The hyper-scale vendors have all invested heavily in this and are building application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable themselves – and others – to use services in the cloud that leverage AI capabilities,» says Priestley.

«By virtue of their huge amount of captive compute resource, data and software skill set, [these vendors have been] instrumental in turning some of the AI concepts into reality.»

This includes the development of a host of open source tools that the wider community is using today, including TensorFlow and MXNet, and large vendor services are frequently being utilised when training AI models.

According to IDC, businesses are already seeing the value of deploying these cloud-based AI solutions. Although less than 10% of European companies use AI in operational systems today, three times that amount are currently experimenting with, piloting or planning AI usage – whether that be to improve sales and marketing, planning and scheduling, or general efficiency.

Benefits to business

Chatbots were an early AI hit within many businesses

«Businesses are seeing early implementations that show how AI-driven solutions, like chatbots, can improve the customer experience and thereby grow businesses – so others want to follow suit,» says Carnelley.

«Unsurprisingly, companies offering AI products and services are growing fast,» he points out.

Indeed, chatbots were one of the earliest AI-powered features to break into the enterprise sphere, and interest looks set to continue.

According to a report published this month by IT company Spiceworks, within the next 12 months, 40% of large businesses expect to implement one or more intelligent assistants or AI chatbots on company-owned devices. They will be joined by 25% mid-sized companies and 27% of small businesses.

However, organisations are also looking more widely at the many ways AI solutions could help them.

The insurance industry, in particular, is looking at how AI can be used to help predict credit scores and how someone may respond to a premium.

«This is not just making a decision but interpreting the data,» says Priestley. «A lot of this wasn’t originally in digital form, but completed by hand. This has been scanned and stored but until recently it was impossible for computer systems to utilise this information. Now, with AI, technology can extract this data and use it to inform decisions.»

Another example he highlights is the medical sector, which is deploying AI-powered systems to help improve the process of capturing and analysing patient data.

«At the moment, MRI and CT scans are interpreted by a human, but there’s a lot of work underfoot to apply AI algorithms that improve the interpretation of these images, and diagnosis (via AI),» says Priestley.

Moving to the edge

Self-driving cars will need latency-free analytics

Given the sheer amount of computational power on hand, the development of AI services is almost exclusively taking place in the cloud but, looking forward, experts believe that many will, at least partially, move to the edge.

The latency associated with the cloud will soon become a problem, especially as more devices require intelligent services that are capable of analysing data and delivering information in real time.

«If I’m in a self-driving car it cannot wait to contact the cloud before making a decision on what to do,» says Priestley. «A lot of inferencing will take place in the cloud, but an increasingly large amount of AI deployment will take place in edge devices.

«They’ll still have a cloud connection, but the workload will be distributed between the two, with much of the initial work done at the edge. When the device itself can’t make a decision, it will connect to the ‘higher authority’ – in the form of the cloud – to look at the information and help it make a decision.»

Essentially, organisations will use the cloud for what it’s good at – scale, training and developing APIs and storing data. Yet it’s clear that the future of cloud-only AI is coming to an end.

Image: Shutterstock

Dubai Airports has moved its employees over to the cloud content management platform Box.

Over 2000 employees are now using Box, which has helped the airport spend less time on servicing file servers and increased collaboration between employees and external partners. Dubai Airports owns and manages the operation and development of both of Dubai’s airports – Dubai International (DXB) and Dubai World Central (DWC).

Using Box, Dubai Airports employees can securely access, edit and share information from any device. Through Box Governance, Box Zones and Box KeySafe, they’re also more easily able to comply with EU data protection standards, which was the company’s initial reason for partnering with Box.

The platform also integrates with Microsoft O365 and Okta and there is also centralised internal project management, digital assets and business-critical records on Box.

Employees can also access and edit content from any device, providing mobility anywhere on the airport campuses, greater Dubai metro and internationally.

Abdulrahman Al Hosani, vice president of Dubai Airport’s Infrastructure and Operations, said that around 88.2 million passengers travelled through Dubai Airports in 2017 and the company was looking to use technology to create a “smoother experience for those customers.

“With Box, we spend less time servicing file servers and support desk tickets and can focus on what we specialise in providing premiere passenger experience, baggage processing, and airfield management,” he said.

He added that the decision to select Box was primarily for security and regulatory purposes. “Box KeySafe, Box Governance, and Box Zones allow us to comply with
EU regulations on data protection,” said Al Hosani. “Now with Box, not only do we have greater control of our content with Box, it has simplified access to information resulting in a significant reduction in associated time and costs.”

The migration to Box, which began in 2016, is only the latest part of Dubai Airports’ journey to becoming fully digital. It has sought to update its image and services through other digital platforms like Clipatize, which has formed social media content and developed methods for measuring customer experience and instituting new workplace values.