The State of Cloud Security in APAC

Recently I spent a week in Beijing, China, at the 2013 Trend Micro CIO Summit, where I gave a talk to a standing room only crowd about the ROI of cloud security. The conference was very well attended, with more than 400 customers, as well as more than 50 alliance partners, and 55 reporters in attendance. I was honored to be interviewed about cloud security on CCTV-News, one of the largest news networks on earth.

Frankly, given that my talk was at two in the afternoon, I did not expect a standing room only crowd. The reason so many people attended the talk is that there are fundamental questions over the cloud model in APAC. Last year, at the same conference, many of the questions and comments from IT executives in China focused on the ROI and deployment cloud computing itself. Since then, a lot of technology infrastructure has moved to the cloud, but it also pulls the business processes along with it so that the business processes themselves are spread across the cloud.

IDC estimates that cloud computing has generated 14 million jobs worldwide, and innovation results from the cloud could produce $1.1 trillion a year in new business revenues. That’s why this year, it seems like the general consensus in APAC is that cloud computing is here to stay. This is great news, but it means the new question is whether cloud security is a good investment in APAC is at the top of their mind.

There was a lot of interest in application based costing for cloud and cloud security, looking at apps per admin, OS instances per admin, or VMs per admin, with scarcely a thought of physical servers per admin. (That’s so 1999…)

It turns out that higher density clouds benefit more from cloud security, because modern cloud security (Deep Security) can share the security load between all VMs on a physical server. The more VMs, the better the security density. This is good news everywhere, but it was very well received in Beijing this year.