Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 34 | Page 74

////////////////////////////////////// FINAL WORD Evaporating the cloud dream Recent research shows that some of the traditional threats and concerns such as denial of service and Cloud Service Providers data loss have over the last few years been addressed by industry and were now rated so low they have been excluded from the top ten threats to your cloud dream. Corien Vermaak, Cyber Security Specialist, Cisco, tells us more. I n the 22nd Annual Global CEO Survey published by PWC, released earlier this year, cyber threats were identified as the fifth largest threat to global growth. When we look at the threats on cloud more specifically, the Cloud Security Alliance has played a crucial role in researching this topic. Based on their research, one of the top five security issues that I would like to discuss is that of Insufficient Identity, Credential, Access and Key Management. This certainly is a wider topic than just identity and access management, however for my purpose I would like to focus on that portion of this problem statement. If we look at Identity Access Management (IAM), we could start as early as the 1960s, when Fernando Corbato invented the first computer password. However, in the modern era of identity and access management that we know was a creation by Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) in the early 1990, this is not nearly a new concept in IT. However, it seems that this is the heat within your control causing evaporation of the cloud dream. This insufficient IAM is listed as the fourth largest threat to cloud and the only threat in the top five that 74 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com