You Can't Just Build A Firewall Around Your Company: Now You Have To Put Firewalls Around Identities

As part of a panel discussion on restoring trust in the cloud at the Trust in the Digital World conference in Vienna, solution strategist at CA Technologies Alfred Bach spoke about how the definition of corporate trust has shifted in the age of the cloud.

There are a lot of problems with leaks of trust. We've seen a huge lack of trust in public services and private services.

If you think about ten years back, your trust relationship was mainly with your family and your employee. You'd come into work, and there'd be a big firewall around the business networks. There's full trust on the inside, and no trust on the outside. No one outside can access anything.

Now you have many different layers of trust. Now you have to trust your cloud provider, and they have to trust you. This is true of mobility devices, cloud services, and social networks.

Mobile devices can be a big chance, however, to add an additional proof of identity.

Social networks also have to be trusted, but they also have to trust you. Why? Because if they can't trust you, then they can't make value out of your data. They live on advertising that's very personalised to you, and it has to be trustworthy. If more than one millions Donald ducks live on Facebook, then it's not so useful for advertising.

In the past, your company worked as an island, and your relationship with other companies was based on fax and correspondence. Now our relationships are fully based on trust. All down the supply chain, you have to trust other companies to deliver what you pay them for.

You also have to trust in the cloud. The cloud can connect partners and divisions, provide secure mobile backends to apps, and solve big data problems in the Internet of things. This all has to do with trust, especially the Internet f things. If you're going to do something to your house over the Internet, you need to know that it's only you who can do that. You want to know that it's only you who can open your car door.

It's no longer easy to say "okay, I'll build a firewall around my company". You have to put firewalls around identities.

Another example is with API management. If it's true of your identity, it's true of your data. We learned this morning that the European Commission came up with lots of penalties for misuse of data – so now it's your responsibility to ensure that you're careful with data, that it's being used in the proper way.

The Trust in the Digital World conference runs from 7-8 April, and ITProPortal will be covering the ins and outs of what's being discussed here in the Austrian Chamber of Commerce.