INTERVIEW
SECURITY ON-DEMAND Sumedh Thakar, Chief Product Officer, Qualys, discusses how cloud technologies can help organisations transform their security strategies.
H
ow has cloud adoption evolved over the last couple of years? Digital transformation has pushed organisations and IT leaders to focus more on cloud. They are increasingly seeing its numerous advantages in helping them innovate faster. Players like AWS and Microsoft Azure have also made cloud solutions easy to access and deploy. In addition, they have simplified solutions making them easier to maintain and manage. The regulations, like the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), are making it more expensive for organisations to retrofit their existing IT infrastructure. Due to this, they find that it will be better to invest their budgets on building a new cloud infrastructure that’s at par with industry standards. 26
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Organisations are also realising the security benefits of cloud. It helps businesses simplify IT security operations and lower the cost of compliance by delivering critical security intelligence on demand and automate and an array of security applications. There are still a few organisations who are not comfortable with their data being out of their control. However, in that aspect, we can see that the idea of private cloud is increasingly becoming popular. When it comes to the maturity of cloud adoption where does the Middle East region stand? We see that US companies are more adoptive of cloud solutions than those in Europe and this region. I believe that’s because of the stricter
regulations that are in place in that part of the world. Organisations in this region tend to be hesitant when it comes to their data being outside their perimeter and potentially being out of their control. Do you see that changing anytime soon? Yes, we are increasingly seeing some changes. Most of our customers in this region, over the last year, have become more open to the idea of cloud. They have discussed that even the board have now mandated that they set up a cloud strategy. At the same time look at tools and solutions that will keep their data secure on the cloud. How do you think have cloud technologies transformed the security space? www.tahawultech.com