The CTO is Dead...Long Live the CTO

Over the last few years i have been witness to a large number of shifts in technology, especially in the corporate fray. The biggest of these shifts might be seen as the migration to mobile working, mobile devices and of course...mobile threats.

There is a new big player on the scene and it affects every last one of those corporations who have a CTO. That new player is Cloud Services.

I'm sure by now your organisation has looked deeply and lovingly at outsourcing and remote hosting and thought, "wow, isn't that so much cheaper!"

Your CTO however, has seen some of the negatives in this, realising that with every piece of outsourced technology or service, his remit gets smaller and smaller. Some businesses have realised this early on and redefined the CTO role to include cloud, some have created new positions.

Most businesses realise that companies which specialise in the delivery of certain services are much better equipped to provide the integration, accessibility and end user requirements, but how many CTOs are considering the security connotations of outsourcing these services. Where we could once control our log verbosity, vulnerability scan our applications and monitor our partners we no longer can. 

The CTOs role now includes a requirement to scope a technology set both locally and in the cloud which aligns with outsource security solutions, so many security vendors are still only compatible with logs from devices on-site, how many are considering monitoring outsourced options?

The new CTO (Cloud Technology Officer) is born and his(or her) requirements align with those of the CISO and the COO, are there any security providers bold enough to step up to this new challenge, is it enough to believe that cloud solutions are secure, just because they say they are? I doubt it, we live in a world where the CTO has as big of an impact on the requirements for security as the security staff.