A major UK-based telecommunications company proposed to conduct a joint research with MSc Information Security students at UCL.
The use of cloud computing as a way of providing and consuming on-demand, pay-as-you-consume ICT service has revolutionised the industry. Services like Amazon EC2 have seen a huge increase in its revenue. However, currently it is the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that are leading the way in the use of these public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings.
The company envisages that as these services become more mature and secure, they will be adopted and used by more “traditional” enterprises like the finance, health and government sector.
Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) plays a very important role in the IT policies of these institutions and as such, for any solution to be adopted by them, these aspects of the IT policies will have to be considered. Several initiatives have been started to address this issue. The Cloud Security Alliance’s GRC Stack is one of the most mature and accepted initiative in this area. It consists of four main stacks – Cloud Controls Matrix, Consensus Assessments Initiative, Cloud Audit and Cloud Trust Protocol.
It was very interesting to participate in the series of workshops to investigate how this framework would impact and be used by the company. This helped me to learn a lot about the telecoms industry and the way they are adopting cloud technologies in a secure way.
Cyber Security Leadership 