What’s the Biggest Security Threat?

Based on a survey sent to over 200 CISOs (see Justin Somaini, Yahoo! CISO, survey here), malware is the most significant security threat, followed by compliance failure, then employee theft, external state espionage, external ecrime, external state sponsored sabotage, and external competitor espionage. Surprised? I was. I predicted that compliance would be #1. I think this position is due to the rise in malware incidents.

Security, Compliance, and the Cloud?

To pick one of many compliance categories, PCI-DSS is probably one of the best in terms of the absolute number of enterprises focused on it. When attending a new course being developed by Anton Chuvakin and the Cloud Security Alliance (see PCI DSS in Cloud Computing Environments), the top concerns involved with security in the cloud included:

  1. Where’s the data?
  2. Who has access?
  3. Do you have the right to audit?
  4. What are the service level agreement (SLA) terms?
  5. What happens if there is a security breach?

This list happens to be 5 out of 10 outlined by Global Knowledge in their recent report, 10 Security Concerns for Cloud Computing.

Jim Kaskade

Jim Kaskade is a serial entrepreneur & enterprise software executive of over 36 years. He is the CEO of Conversica, a leader in Augmented Workforce solutions that help clients attract, acquire, and grow end-customers. He most recently successfully exited a PE-backed SaaS company, Janrain, in the digital identity security space. Prior to identity, he led a digital application business of over 7,000 people ($1B). Prior to that he led a big data & analytics business of over 1,000 ($250M). He was the CEO of a Big Data Cloud company ($50M); was an EIR at PARC (the Bell Labs of Silicon Valley) which resulted in a spinout of an AML AI company; led two separate private cloud software startups; founded of one of the most advanced digital video SaaS companies delivering online and wireless solutions to over 10,000 enterprises; and was involved with three semiconductor startups (two of which he founded, one of which he sold). He started his career engineering massively parallel processing datacenter applications. Jim has an Electrical and Computer Science Engineering degree from University of California, Santa Barbara, with an emphasis in semiconductor design and computer science; and an MBA from the University of San Diego with an emphasis in entrepreneurship and finance.