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Leading CSOs Embrace Cloud Computing as an Opportunity and Agree that Social Networking is an Overhyped Threat at Latest CSO Interchange
June 2010 by CSO Interchange
A meeting of 30 CSOs representing many of the UK’s leading enterprises at the bi-annual CSO Interchange event in London last week offered practical insights on subjects including cloud security, data classification, social networking, data privacy, access control, and the changing roles of IT professionals. A live poll at the event revealed that CSOs view social networking as the most over-hyped threat, above other possible threats such as data leakage, targeted and non-targeted attacks, internal fraud and active economic warfare. 70% of those polled consider centralizing data with a cloud computing solution as an opportunity, while 30% view it as a risk.
The lively discussion on cloud computing concluded that there was an urgent need for a common set of industry standards to enable companies to evaluate and compare alternative cloud providers. The consensus was that there is an unstoppable move towards cloud computing and that the industry needs to focus on developing best practices on how to choose and deploy cloud computing solutions.
On the subject of social networking, discussions indicated a strong preference for companies to ban social networking - with the notable exception of LinkedIn, which most companies consider acceptable. 75% of companies - a number largely unchanged since last year’s poll – revealed that their organizations had chosen to ban social networking, recognizing that this was due to its impact on productivity as much as on security. The overwhelming majority recognized that banning company use of these tools risked alienating younger members of the workforce who could be tempted to resort to their own mobile devices, and most delegates advocated more education of enterprise users to help them understand how to use social networking tools in a responsible manner.
Another area of heated debate centered on the role of the IT professional five years from now. About 35% of the CSOs claimed that their roles already include technical, legal, managerial, political and communications elements, whilst 22% still view their roles as predominantly technical. The discussions on this subject touched on the reduction in the number of internal IT staff required by organizations due to the move to cloud computing infrastructures and the migration of the majority of the remaining roles from internal support roles towards managing large data centre infrastructures, either for cloud vendors or for large corporate users.
Qualys Chairman and CEO and Founder of CSO Interchange Philippe Courtot summed up the morning by saying, “The discussions and views aired at these events always reinforce my view of the immense and ever-changing nature of the challenges facing today’s CSOs. It’s no longer sufficient to be technologically astute but increasingly in the future they will also need to display a variety of skills ranging from technician to communicator and evangelist.”
To find out more about joining the CSO Interchange and to download the full survey findings visit: http://www.csointerchange.org.
About CSO Interchange
Howard Schmidt, former White House advisor, and Philippe Courtot, Qualys Chairman and CEO, founded the CSO Interchange in 2004 to provide a forum for Chief Security Officers at corporations, government agencies and other organisations to exchange ideas, discuss challenges and learn from the real-world experiences of their peers. The event is organized by Security Vibes, a private online community focused at senior security practitioners, which provides an independent forum to discuss a wide variety of security issues that affect their organisations and reveal their top-of-mind concerns through interactive surveys. The concept started in the US in 2004 and there have been five successful events there including one this year at RSA in San Francisco. The recent CSO Interchange in London was organized by Security Vibes and sponsored by Qualys with the participation of KPMG and I4, the International Information, Integrity Institute. More information about CSO Interchange can be found at http://www.csointerchange.org.
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