IT pros name users, GDPR as biggest cloud computing security threats

The cloud is growing faster than companies can prepare for cloud computing security threats, a quartet of tech leaders say at a Boston forum. But managing risk is within reach. You know a technology has become standard when an institution founded before electricity plugs it in. Just look at The Hartford. The 208-year-old insurance company -- whose business is protecting against loss -- is embracing cloud computing, a technology that not long ago struck fear into both the IT and business sides of companies, regardless of industry. Data architecture manager Asha Potdar is helping usher the Hartford, Conn., institution into the cloud, moving traditional applications there and building new, cloud-native ones. That's bringing on a plenitude of change, calling for new skills, new ways of coding, new ways of developing software. But among the challenges Potdar faces in The Hartford's cloud journey, cybersecurity is the most acute, and it's holding up a major project. "Now that we are opening to the public cloud, the connections that can come from public into our network are what we are trying to strengthen," she said at the Argyle 2018 CIO Leadership Forum in Boston on May 2. So the plan is get the right controls in place and "strengthen our networking capabilities before I can open up the cloud for production applications." A handful of IT leaders at the convention gathered onstage at District Hall in Boston's booming Seaport neighborhood to address cloud computing security threats -- risks to users' privacy, for example, and users themselves -- as well as ways to manage them.