In his session at @ThingsExpo, Eric Lachapelle, CEO of the Professional Evaluation and Certification Board (PECB), will provide an overview of various initiatives to certifiy the security of connected devices and future trends in ensuring public trust of IoT. Eric Lachapelle is the Chief Executive Officer of the Professional Evaluation and Certification Board (PECB), an international certification body. His role is to help companies and individuals to achieve professional, accredited and worldwide recognized certification against various international standards. He also has extensive experience as a trainer and an educator in the fields of Information Security, Risk Management and IT. Throughout his career, he has worked in North America, Latin America and Asia with individuals and various companies of all sizes.

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Software as a service (SaaS), one of the earliest and most successful cloud services, has reached mainstream status. According to Cisco, by 2019 more than four-fifths (83 percent) of all data center traffic will be based in the cloud, up from 65 percent today. The majority of this traffic will be applications.
Businesses of all sizes are adopting a variety of SaaS-based services – everything from collaboration tools to mission-critical commerce-oriented applications. The rise in SaaS usage has many positive benefits, but one drawback is that as demand grows, SaaS providers are having a harder time ensuring a high-performing (fast, reliable) end-user experience – at the same time performance expectations are growing higher than ever.

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Everyone wants their device of choice right there next to them 24/7. To an employer, however, that smart device is nothing more than a dagger posed to rip apart every shred of corporate security. This reality of modern business was highlighted by the Information Security Community on LinkedIn through their 2016 Spotlight Report on “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD).

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In large enterprises, environment provisioning and server provisioning account for a significant portion of the operations team’s time. This often leaves users frustrated while they wait for these services. For instance, server provisioning can take several days and sometimes even weeks.
At the same time, digital transformation means the need for server and environment provisioning is constantly growing. Organizations are adopting agile methodologies and software teams are increasing the speed of their development processes, thus requiring more and more servers and environments to be provisioned for their development and testing.

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One in three respondents in a survey conducted by AlienVault said the state of security monitoring in their organisation was ‘complex and chaotic’, adding a ‘major disconnect’ was still in place between beliefs and actions in cloud security.

The survey, conducted at the RSA conference in San Francisco back in February, polled 974 attendees. One in five (21%) admit they don’t know how many cloud applications are being used in their organisation, while 39% say it is more than 10. 42% of respondents say lack of visibility into their cloud activities is a ‘significant’ concern.

Almost two thirds (62%) said they were worried about Internet of Things (IoT) devices in their environment – yet 45% added that they saw the benefits of IoT outweigh the risks. 43% of respondents said their company does not monitor IoT traffic at all – a finding which was described as ‘frightening’ by AlienVault – while 20% said they didn’t know what traffic was monitored.

“The driving force behind cloud and IoT is the availability and analysis of information, but they must be managed and monitored in the right way,” said Javvad Malik, AlienVault security advocate. “If data is misused, or inadequately protected, the consequences can be severe.”

Writing for this publication earlier this month, iland director of EMEA marketing Monica Brink argued that this was the year when IoT ‘moved up the agenda’ for business investment in cloud technologies. “IoT data tends to be heterogeneous and stored across multiple systems; as such, the market is calling for analytical tools that seamlessly connect to and combine all those cloud-hosted data sources, enabling businesses to explore and visualise any type of data stored anywhere in order to maximise the value of their IoT investment,” she wrote.

“It’s time for organisations to focus on what they do have control over – threat detection and incident response – and implement a unified solution that can monitor on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments,” added Malik. “Simplifying security in this way enables companies to immediately identify and respond to threats, and in today’s cybersecurity landscape, this is the best strategy to mitigate risk.”

The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer cloud adoption patterns discussion explores how integration of the latest cloud tools and methods help smooth out the difficult task of creating and maintaining cloud-infrastructure services contracts. The results are more flexible digital services that both save cloud consumers money and provide the proper service levels and performance characteristics for each unique enterprise and small business.

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Digital transformation requires rapid network changes. Navigating these changes well is difficult but critical, as the function of business applications are at stake. Customers aren’t interested in what’s going on behind the scenes; they simply want the platform to work. Hosting Facts researchers found that a single-second delay in website loading time can result in a seven percent loss in conversion, and 40 percent of web users will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

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