The process to secure a cloud environment is different from more traditional data center practices, so cloud adoption requires a learning curve for IT teams. Unauthorized access to resources is the most common cloud security threat; many high-profile exposures of sensitive data resulted from misconfigurations.

The cloud is generally more secure than most private data centers since Amazon and Microsoft can hire talented engineers and automate many of their practices. Cloud infrastructure providers also offer tools and architectural options to isolate workloads, encrypt data and detect potential threats.

It is your data to do with as you need, but be able to answer the question “why?” Why would you want to maintain a workload on-premise when you can move it into the cloud? There, keeping the lights on is managed for you instead of having to maintain it yourself separately.

This is an interesting problem, essentially the approach to take in this situation is to choose which data is the authority and leverage that data source over the other – in this situation if I knew good data was getting replaced with bad data by users, the first approach I would take is user access control – do users need to change this data to do their job? If not, they don’t need access to change it. If they do need to change it, but mistakes get made, in that case I would create a workflow that compares the two data sources, and if the secondary source is different than the authoritative source, it overwrites the alternative source.

ROK approaches this problem in a way that respects our client’s budget. Oftentimes these security certifications require costly annual audits, documentation, etc. To help our clients avoid paying for this process twice (once for their environment that exists already, and one for the ROK environment), ROK provides services where we are able to be on-boarded as contractors within your existing certified environment and are able to provide the same level of service you would expect with a ROK owned environment, except you only have to deal with a single auditing process.