CLOUD RISK AGGREGATION: TACKLING THE EXPOSURES WHILE REAPING THE BENEFITS
Cloud computing is a relatively recent development impacting technology and businesses alike. While cloud computing principles date back to the 1990s, it was not until the mid-2010s that it became commercially viable. In 2006, Amazon started Amazon Web Services with new cloud-based services, including storage and virtual computers. In the same year, Google started offering cloud-based services such as Google Docs and forged a cloud partnership with IBM. In 2008, Netflix began to move away from its original business model and started using the cloud for selling ‘on-demand’ video via the internet. The cloud is expected to become even more dominant in the near future. Gartner suggests that by “2025, cloud computing will be pervasive. Cloud will drive not only technological innovation, but also serve as the foundation for business innovation”.
One of the more common definitions of cloud computing is the one published by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). According NIST, “cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”.
NIST highlights key cloud characteristics including on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service. NIST first introduced the concept of the service and deployment model, namely infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and private, community, public and hybrid cloud.
Jul-Sep 2022 Issue
HSBC