China’s cloud service providers have been urged to beef up their security ecosystem in expectation of managed security services becoming a new growth area in the increasingly challenging area of security.
IDC’s latest China Cloud Service Provider Security 2017 Vendor Assessment found that the nation’s public cloud computing market expanded 54% in 2016 from a year earlier as more enterprises started to deploy their business to the public cloud.
However, recently enterprises are increasingly becoming the targets of hackers as the digital transformation boosts their digital asset value, making security a major concern for public cloud service tenants.
Digital transformation has linked enterprises’ business security closely with IT security, resulting in a big increase in enterprises’ digital asset value. This has also attracted the interest of criminals and hackers, posing a huge threat to enterprises’ digital assets.
In May 2017, the WannaCry blackmail virus once again sounded the alarm bell, attesting to the fact that a considerable number of enterprises urgently need to improve the security of their IT systems.
As public cloud tenants generally lack the ability to build security in a cloud environment, therefore cloud service providers have an unshakable responsibility to safeguard their cloud tenants’ business security. Thus, cloud service providers are facing unprecedented security challenges.
IT security systems must be built with the strong support and close supervision of the government. The Chinese government has elevated the importance of cyberspace security to the level of national security, though cloud service providers also bear an unprecedented level of responsibility when it comes to security.
It is essential that cloud service providers play the role of managed security service provider (MSSP) to help their tenants build secure IT systems.
For cloud tenants, the only way to foster their strengths, circumvent their weaknesses, and use the capabilities provided by cloud service providers to strengthen the security of their IT systems is to raise their own security awareness and forge in-depth cooperation with cloud service providers.
It is widely known that the security capabilities offered by cloud service providers have much room for improvement. In order to learn from others’ strong points to bolster their own weak links and win tenants’ unanimous recognition of their security strength, cloud service providers must engage in in-depth cooperation and close collaboration with professional IT security vendors through security ecosystem building.
Building a complete security ecosystem will provide more reliable technical support for cloud service providers and their tenants.
“Implementation of the Cyberspace Security Law of the People’s Republic of China means that cloud service providers now bear even greater security responsibilities. Cloud security capability enhancement will become one of the important strategies for cloud service providers in the future,” IDC China senior research manager James Wang said.
“In addition, as enterprises generally lack security planning and building abilities, they will have an urgent need for managed security service in building next-generation security systems. Globally, the managed security service model has been widely accepted by enterprises, while China’s managed security service market is still in its early stages.”
Drawing upon their sound security ecosystem and rich security experience, public cloud service providers in China can provide managed security services to their large number of cloud tenants. Consequently, cloud service providers will be most likely to become the best practitioners of managed security services.
Since China set up the Central Leading Group for Network Affairs in 2014, the importance of cyberspace security has risen to the height of national strategy. Following the release of Cyberspace Security Law of the People’s Republic of China, the National Cyberspace Security Strategy and other related laws, regulations and policies in recent years, security and trustworthiness have become key to enterprise-level users’ IT system building.
For important sectors and fields such as public communications, information services, energy, transportation, water conservancy, finance, public service and e-government, it is more important to ensure a secure and trustworthy key information infrastructure. As a result, enterprise security building standards in China feature distinctive Chinese characteristics.
