Cloud technologies
IT’S TIME TO RE-EVALUATE PUBLIC CLOUD MIGRATION Jason Van der Schyff, COO, SoftIron
T
he proposed Hosting Certification Framework introduced by the Digital Transformation Agency earlier this year is a call for a new approach to building critical national infrastructure. The framework stipulates that all relevant government data will need to be stored only in either ‘certified assured’ or ‘certified strategic’ data centres. This new approach follows concerns about the acute data challenges confronting the Australian public sector and aims to mitigate against data centre ownership risks, including data sovereignty, supply-chain vulnerabilities and cybersecurity threats. This is a very timely addition to the regulatory framework for Australia at a time when nations around the world are responding to the challenge of building sovereign resilience. At a hosting level at least it provides the framework for
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better auditing and assurance of those facilities and their operation. However, there’s an issue. Are we shutting the cabinet door after the data has already bolted? What about all the data and services that have already left the infrastructure and facilities run by our public servants and are now run in the public cloud? THE SCRAMBLE TO THE CLOUD IN THE PANDEMIC Migration to the public cloud in both the public and the private sectors has been happening over perhaps a decade or more now, but has only been accelerated in the last 18 months as organisations rushed to the cloud to maintain operations during the pandemic. However, organisations are now left figuring out how to adequately protect both data and services that are hosted in the cloud. Cloud services are essentially akin to ‘someone else’s
computer’, with many hidden behind a wall, meaning organisations who are using cloud services have little to no real visibility on how the infrastructure is really and instead must rely on ‘trust’. Time to take a breath and review where we are. The way in which organisations, particularly the Australian public sector, store and manage data now has the opportunity to change for the better. It’s important for government agencies to understand the four key areas of concern for cloud services and how to overcome these challenges as they look to benefit from the new hosting framework. And, to identify the best pathways towards sovereign resilience we first need to understand the recent drivers of the mass move to the public cloud, and the common underlying issues in the infrastructure being used to provide public cloud services.
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