Is your engineering data secure in the cloud?

Engineers are usually paranoid about the safety of their data. This is a good thing.

Engineering designs usually represent the organization’s crown jewels and you want to know they are kept safe. But what if the safest place for this precious data is actually outside the walls of your organization?

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has become the default IT platform for a majority of applications. According to a 2017 survey by Intel Security, 80% of enterprises now have a cloud-first policy in place. Interestingly, it was the US federal government that led the way by instilling a cloud-first policy across all its agencies way back in 2010. Since that time an astonishing 3,125 federal agency data centers have been closed, and a further 2,078 data centers will be closed over the next four years. That means in the 10 years from 2010 to 2020, the US government is on track to decommission half its data centers.

The driver for this seismic shift is the realization that cloud computing is a source of advantage of national importance. Agencies can get out of the data center management business and innovate faster, spend less, and better manage risk. The message for industry is this: IT and business leaders can no longer point to the bogeyman of security to avoid evaluating cloud. If the Department of Defense is comfortable with the security profile of public clouds for some of its data processing, it’s probably time for for you to take a closer look.

Public clouds are secure because their very existence depends on it

Over the years, cloud providers have integrated sophisticated levels of security to protect their customers’ data and applications. For example Microsoft Azure offers secure point-to-site connectivity, secure site-to-site connectivity, and even private site-to-site connectivity with ExpressRoute. This last option guarantees a secure private link between your company’s infrastructure and the cloud. You can run your workloads on dedicated servers which are exclusive to you for the duration of use and avoid multi-tenancy threats. Applications are installed only by badged experts. High Performance Computing (HPC) resources and storage are safeguarded like Fort Knox.

A cloud provider who caused a security breach would face the risk to be out of business soon afterwards.

Putting you in control of your data

Engineers care about the safety of their designs; engineering data can be of strategic importance to an organization as a source of competitive advantage. The key for engineering leaders who want to work in the cloud such as Azure HPC, is working with a partner who understands this. A partner who has been there and whose executives have deep experience in highly regulated industries, and have the expertise to support your compliance requirements.

For example, you want to find a parter who can help you run in a private compute environment. You may want to enable encryption for data transfers, remote access, and data storage. Have your partner demonstrate that your compute resources are dedicated to you and not shared. And that when your processing is finished, your environment is deleted.

Your engineering cloud partner should only use professionally managed Clouds with strong physical security controls including biometric entry authentication and armed guards. Ask for fine grained access control which give you the flexibility to define your security requirements. Your IT team should tell the partner what firewall rules and authentication methods they want. The partner implements them. Done.

A partner such as UberCloud works with your security and compliance experts to pick your resources, whether it be a cloud provider or your own corporate datacenter. With this flexibility, you can now get both great performance and be in control of your information assets. Security in the cloud is finally within reach.