Some big-name data breaches took place in 2015. As we look forward to 2016, it’s crucial to take a step back and look at how these events occurred so we can have a better idea of how to protect ourselves in the future. It is also important to make sure our cloud service providers continue to make security a priority.
What happened in 2015?
In a list of the biggest data breaches of 2015, Network World placed the incident affecting the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management at the very top. In April, it was discovered that the information of nearly 22 million people – all current or former government employees – had been compromised by a huge attack on OPM’s systems.
Further compounding the mess of the OPM’s breach, the Washington Post reported in early December that the organization was still trying to get in touch with some of the people impacted by the incident. The government is nearly finished mailing out these notifications – but there’s no telling whether the missives reached their final destinations or were sent to old addresses.
Other big breaches on Network World’s list happened to health insurance providers Anthem and Premera, which were likely hacked by the same malicious party, as they occurred on the same day. This demonstrates the impact that these kinds of intrusions have on the health care industry.
Also in 2015, the Ponemon Institute released data that revealed 91 percent of health care organizations had been the victim of a data breach within the last five years. This is a troubling trend, especially with the continued adoption of electronic health records that have sensitive information like birth dates, Social Security numbers and credit card numbers.
Boiling it down
What do those security incidents have in common? They all involved data housed within private data centers. It’s for this reason that private cloud infrastructure may not be the best solution for those organizations housing mountains of extremely confidential data. If too many people have access to data, this only increases the chances of a security breach.
This is a clear indication of how public cloud infrastructure is more secure than privately managed environments. InfoWorld contributor and noted cloud expert David Linthicum stressed that because public cloud providers practice good security across the board, that might be a better option when it comes time to decide where to house data and applications.
“Public cloud providers practice good security across the board.”
With private clouds and data center infrastructure, malicious actors can potentially gain access to data and applications from a company’s physical access point – which in general is probably less secure than those protected by the larger hyperscale providers like Amazon Web Services and Oracle. These public cloud companies invest in the most up-to-date security practices, ensuring their customers have access to top-level protections and keeping data safe.
“What public clouds bring to the table are better security mechanisms and paranoia as a default, given how juicy they are as targets,” Linthicum wrote in December. “The cloud providers are much better at systemic security services, such as looking out for attacks using pattern matching technology and even AI systems. This combination means they have very secure systems. It should be no surprise that the hackers move on to easier pickings: enterprise data centers.”
At Inspirage, we go even further. The number of people who can access our hosted instances is limited to a small number of trustworthy individuals. This way, our customers know their data is protected from unauthorized access. Be sure to Contact Inspirage today for more information about public cloud options from Oracle and our security protocols.
