The battle for cloud in Asia is heating up.

China is poised to become the second-largest cloud service market in 2019, worth $10.5 billion. The country will also become the fastest-growing market, with a projected 44.9% annual growth rate in the next five years.

Amazon is betting it can expand its cloud computing operations in China, despite announcing just last month that it will shutter its online retail operations there.

But while Amazon is upbeat about demand for cloud services in the region, it faces a familiar rival: Alibaba, whose grip on China's e-commerce market meant Amazon was unable to challenge.

In Asia, according to Gartner, AWS is not the big dog and Alibaba Cloud commands 19.6% of the market, compared to 11% for AWS and 8% for Microsoft.

One of the biggest advantages of being the "home team" comes from government regulations that have created barriers to foreign players entering the market.

Also, Alibaba Cloud over the years has created a powerful business ecosystem where it has invested in over 157 companies in China.

AWS, by contrast, will have an edge in winning over foreign companies that operate in China and have already been using AWS's products in offices outside the country.

AWS seems has high hopes for Southeast Asia's cloud services market which is expected to generate $40.32 billion in revenue by 2025, driven by increasing demand for cloud computing among emerging small and midsize business.


But it seems that governments across the region move toward stricter governance on cloud services similar to those in China requiring cloud services operators to store data in local data centers.

Indonesia, for example, ruled that the country's financial data should be housed within Indonesia. AWS announced that it is planning to launch multiple data centers in Jakarta, where Alibaba Cloud already has two.

Fascinating, battle and looking forward to seeing what Microsoft and Google are going to do.

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Cloud security - Busy Securing the Fort when Users Leave the Door Open?

Busy Securing the Fort when Users Leave the Door Open?

There have been few technological innovations that have impacted the course of business processes as much as the cloud. The promise of the cloud offers faster communications, greater collaboration, and a more profitable bottom line. Conversely, cloud infrastructure also creates new security vulnerabilities which enterprises struggle to patch.

It is a never-ending work for the enterprise security team to select, deploy and configure the best security solutions for their environment.

However, on a day to day basis they are faced with the ONE consistent problem that continues to plague security solutions worldwide. Is the generation of too many alerts to the enterprise security teams and the burn out of professionals overwhelmed by a false positive?

The most dangerous and insidious threat of all

Whilst your security team focus on perimeter defenses and endpoint security, there is one element that your CISOs could easily deal with. This is probably the most dangerous and insidious security threat your company have to face with: “The internal misconfiguration of cloud resources.”

Cloud misconfiguration is one of the most preventable, yet common security issues facing organizations migrating to the cloud today.

A simple misconfiguration to set a single option in a company’s cloud service can create a major security risk for the organization and its customers. Almost every day, news of a new data breach spreads like wildfire online. Virtually everyone with any kind of digital footprint has fallen victim to having their personal information made public.

A Common Issue “Cloud Misconfiguration” 

Misconfiguration means that the public cloud server instances, such as storage and compute, are configured in such a way that they are vulnerable to breaches.

Cloud misconfiguration is a matter of human error. In many cases, dev ops or IT professionals accustomed to local infrastructure attempt to recreate their local solutions in the cloud, uneducated and unaware of the intricacies of working with a cloud provider’s particular set of features.

Run Books? Who reads manuals?

The cloud has created a lot of excitement within organizations and many departments such as DevOps, Marketing, Sales, Product development people are busy giving their company a new competitive edge in their respective markets and use cloud resources to do so.  The reality is that cloud configuration is complex, and many companies are still immature. Even though companies are using run books and best practices documents, users simply forget to follow the rules.

While simple misconfiguration seems like a “duh, dummy” moment, the reality is, if it's not done right any security systems layered by the security department on top of your cloud can’t stop hackers running away with your data.

So, what are you to do?

• Use a cloud management company, such as Cass, which will use their supervision tool to constantly monitor your cloud resources and immediately spot configurations holes.
• Protect your security team from false alerts, by using the experts within Cass to diagnose and filter the wave of alerts.
• Go straight to the answer by using Cass recommendations to fix the security mishap.

The complexities of cloud computing, and the chance of human error will hurt you if you do not do anything and can ruin all the security measures you are putting in place to keep undesirable visitors out.

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