The
hacking of Twitter is an indication that businesses are being pushed to move their IT operations into the cloud before their security policy is ready for the new challenges posed by such moves, according to a British storage system integration firm.
"Our observations suggest that a number of companies and their staff are being forced down the cloud computing route and are having to adapt their IT security systems on the fly," Andy Cordial, managing director of Basingstoke, U.K.-based Origin Storage, wrote in a statement sent to Channelweb Thursday.
"We have had concerns about this rate of change in the business sector for some time and, with all the data breaches occurring on the cloud front, it's obvious that the chickens are now coming home to roost," he added.
This week's revelation that a person going by the moniker "Hacker Croll" broke into the Gmail account of a Twitter employee and managed to make off with sensitive internal documents from the company has cast a new spotlight on the security of conducting business computing in the cloud, with particular scrutiny of Google Apps services like Gmail.
Google itself claims that the security for its enterprise-class Google Apps services is robust, and Twitter frontman Biz Stone, blogging about the hacking of his company Wednesday, seemed to concur.
"This attack had nothing to do with any vulnerability in Google Apps, which we continue to use. This is more about Twitter being in enough of a spotlight that folks who work here can become targets," Stone wrote on Twitter's blog.
But Origin Storage's Cordial and other security experts raise a different sort of question. They say that the means to properly secure IT operations in the cloud may be in place at the service provider's end, but the hard work of integrating those security mechanisms with companies' own internal protocols isn't getting done in the mad dash to the cloud.
"Applying effective security is all about planning and then applying that planning, backed up by a set of solid security policies with encryption at its heart," Cordial said.
"If Twitter had had this strategy operating at all levels of its hierarchy, rather than apparently going for user growth at any cost, it wouldn't be in the embarrassing situation it is now."
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