A Few Thoughts Following Our Inaugural Cloud Security Summit

Cloud computing has dramatically changed the way that organizations operate, but very few companies are “all-in”: instead, most companies are on a “journey” to cloud adoption — from deploying their first applications to the cloud, to full scale digital transformation of the business.

Last Thursday (May 12, 2016), Alert Logic took to London, along the banks of the River Thames at Millbank Tower, Altitude, to host its inaugural Cloud Security Summit in the UK, with over 200 delegates congregating to hear how organizations can close security gaps to accelerate and de-risk their cloud adoption and digital transformation.

Keynotes from Martin Whitworth of Forrester, Ian Massingham of AWS, and James Brown of Alert Logic drove the framework of the day’s agenda, with customer experiences from James Heaton of Elsevier, Adam Hope of Which? Technology and Brett King of FunkyPigeon.com providing valuable insight into their best practices and learnings for moving their business critical workloads to AWS, and how managed security services are supporting them.

These morning sessions architected the story: Cloud platforms are secure, but the applications and business critical workloads hosted on the platform require customers to take responsibility for their applications. The customer experiences included a live cyber hack demo that showed how easy it is to exploit a known vulnerability that is 100% the end-users’ responsibility to secure.

After a successful morning, our guests made their way up to Millbank Tower’s 29th floor, Altitude, for remarkable sights of Big Ben and the London Eye. It was during this period that most of our attendees took the opportunity to complete our online survey, with some interesting results:

• Just 40% of attendees recognised that they are responsible for securing their web applications hosted on AWS — which is a wakeup call for the remaining 60%
• 51% of respondents claimed to have just endpoint or perimeter security for protecting their cloud workloads, rather than extending to deeper threat protection capabilities (such as IDS/IPS, vulnerability management, log management, or web application firewalls)
• In regards to the ability to identify, stop, and remediate a cyber-attack at 3am, just 19% were confident they possessed the capabilities — leaving 81% to state that they were unsure or had no confidence they could protect themselves from an early-morning cyber attack

Shortly after lunch, breakout sessions ensued, revolving around integrating security into DevOps, Shared Compliance, Behind the Scenes: Cyber Crime, and Architecting Security Into Your AWS Environment.

The afternoon sessions concluded with Alert Logic SVP Product Management Bill Shelton and CSO Misha Govshteyn driving home the importance of adapting to change in the cloud, and the importance of cyber resiliency following a breach.

Alert Logic and AWS demonstrated that cloud security is more relevant today than ever before — it’s at the heart of successful cloud adoption and swift digital transformation.

Many thanks to our event sponsoring partners: Amazon Web Services, Adapt, CloudHealth, Cloudreach, Logicworks, Rackspace, and KCOM.

Also, a huge thank you to all of our internal and external speakers; the day wouldn’t have been the same without each of your involvement.

Originally published at www.alertlogic.com. Missed out on the UK Cloud Security Summit? You still have a chance to register for our New York City Cloud Security Summit in June for free!