(Cloudtech, 10/31/18)
Cloud computing is now a primary driver of the world’s digital economy. Governments, large corporations and small businesses are increasingly implementing cloud-based infrastructures and solutions to store their sensitive data and manage their operations.
While the cloud offers lower costs, scalability and flexibility, it also expands a company’s risk profile exponentially. In fact, attackers are continually refining their techniques to take advantage of the millions of identical binary templates for virtual environments (aka golden images) that power those cloud and Virtual Machine (VM) benefits.
Cloud and VM environments share parallels with Genetically Modified (GM) crops – yields are extremely high around carefully developed identical DNA sequences, but a single bug or virus can scale to destroy not just one, but all crops in a monoculture since there is no natural diversity to protect them. In a cloud context, a zero-day attack can take down all production systems and disaster recovery systems, disrupting business continuity and prompting financial loss.