Cloud Providers Must Enhance Their Security Controls

We see it all the time, social media sites being hacked and accounts being compromised, this has become a routine part of the internet (LinkedIn hack is much worse than you think), but in order to protect sensitive data and prevent embarrassment for organizations, these social media outlets must take a stronger stance on security and start to develop moderator controls. This especially holds true for enterprises that utilize social media avenues to promote their products.

Recently Major League Baseball was hacked on Facebook (Jeter has sex change in Yankees Facebook page hack), and being a Yankee fan I was surprised to learn that Derek Jeter was having a sex change:

“We regret to inform our fans that Derek Jeter will miss the rest of the season with sexual reassignment surgery. He promises to come back stronger than ever in 2013 as Minnie Mantlez.”

This of course was not true and was quickly caught and taken down. However had Facebook offered moderator controls, a feature they could easily charge for, these comments would never have been posted to begin with.

I have worked in the cloud space for over 15 years, you may think the concept of cloud is new, but in fact, we used to call this very concept, outsourced, hosted and managed services before some clever think tank decided to call it a cloud based solution.

The problem is that most organizations accept the contractual terms that outline security assuming they are protected, and from a legal perspective they probably are, however how does an organization bounce back from an attack on their reputation? The fact is that depending on the seriousness of the event, they may never be able to recover.

While this particular event was humorous, what if it was true, how do you take back a statement once the bell has already been wrung? This all starts with enterprises becoming more aware of the cloud solutions they are utilizing and putting in place stop gap measures to make sure that the cloud providers are in fact policing themselves the way they claim. Without a proper audit and penetration testing, there is no way to be certain your data is truly protected.

Frank Toscano is a 15+ year specialist in cloud based services focusing on Product Management, Marketing and Security within the Cloud. He has worked for EasyLink Services and Premiere Global Services in a global role providing hosted services to Fortune 1000 clients. He is currently seeking employment with a cloud based provider in a senior level Product/Marketing role.