Welcome to the Office of Pre-Compliance

Over the past few years, I've heard about all the benefits of adopting a cloud environment within the enterprise—lower computing costs, smaller carbon footprint and higher efficiency—but a new one keeps popping up: security.

It seems a bit counterintuitive that cloud computing could be more secure than running everything in a locked-down datacenter, but hear me out.

First of all, we are definitely not there yet. Today's public clouds aren't as secure as they can be, but just give them time. If they are going to thrive, like I believe they will, then they are going to have to make their security as bulletproof as possible just to stay in business. Once they've mastered this aspect, enterprises can learn from the cloud providers' best practices.

Secondly, as the cloud management matures and issues of identity management are hammered out, the performance logs will provide a treasure trove of data for security purposes.

If you have ever read sci-fi author Philip K. Dick's Minority Report, or saw the 2002 Tom Cruise movie based on the short story, a law enforcement agency uses information from three precognitives, or precogs, who can see crimes before they occur, to arrest the criminal before they can act.

Now imagine if you replace those precogs with a massive amount of data on every user’s behavior on the cloud. It shouldn't be that difficult to do some behavior modeling to see if someone is acting out of the norm, accessing files they shouldn't be, or downloading a massive amount of data to removable storage. Anyone who is on Facebook or has played any online game already knows this.

It's just a matter of mastering the massive amount of user data and developing the proper analytics.