Accelerate to defend: why Defence Departments and Armed Forces should accelerate cloud adoption to improve cyber security

90 percent of nation state related cyber-attacks are directed at NATO nations. 49 percent of those target public sector entities. A third of these attacks are successful and most victims are operating on premise data centers and IT.

Cyber security is one of the most pressing challenges for Defence Departments and Armed Forces around the world. As cyber threats and vulnerabilities increase in complexity and sophistication, traditional network security methods are no longer sufficient to protect sensitive data and critical infrastructure. That's why Defence Departments and Armed Forces should accelerate their cloud adoption to improve their cyber security posture and resilience.

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services such as servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence over the internet. Cloud computing offers many benefits to confer military advantage and maintain operational resilience, such as:

• Scalability: Cloud computing allows defence departments and armed forces to scale up or down their computing resources according to their operational needs and budget constraints.
• Agility: Cloud computing enables defence departments and armed forces to deploy new applications and services faster and easier than on-premise solutions.
• Cost-efficiency: Cloud computing reduces the capital expenditure and operational costs of maintaining physical servers, hardware, software licenses, and energy consumption.
• Innovation: Cloud computing fosters innovation by providing access to advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), big data analytics, internet of things (IoT), blockchain, etc.

Hyperscale cloud provides the ability to automate many aspects of cyber threat detection and defence. 微软 assesses 65 trillion security signals per day and defence against 900 attacks per second. AI powered defence delivers a level of capability that can’t be matched by stand-alone solutions or on premise security management.

To address cyber security challenges while leveraging the benefits of cloud computing, Defence Departments should adopt a “zero trust architecture” approach. Zero trust architecture is a cyber security paradigm that assumes that no entity (user, device, network, application, service etc.) can be trusted by default and requires continuous verification and validation of its identity and authorization before granting access or performing transactions. Zero trust architecture relies on several principles and practices such as:

• Identity management: Zero trust architecture requires strong identity management systems that use multifactor authentication (MFA), single sign-on (SSO), biometric verification etc. to verify the identity of users who access cloud services.
• Device management: Zero trust architecture requires robust device management systems that use encryption, patching,?antivirus, firewall etc. to secure the devices that connect to cloud services.
• Network segmentation: Zero trust architecture requires granular network segmentation that divides the network into smaller zones with different levels of access control based on user roles,?data sensitivity, application functionality etc.
• Data encryption: Zero trust architecture requires end-to-end data encryption that protects data at rest (in storage) and in transit (in communication) using cryptographic keys and algorithms.
• Data classification: Zero trust architecture requires accurate data classification that labels data according to its value and risk using metadata and tags.
• Data minimization: Zero trust architecture requires prudent data minimization that reduces the amount and retention period of data collected ?and stored using anonymization or pseudonymization techniques.
• Continuous monitoring: Zero trust architecture requires comprehensive continuous monitoring that collects and analyzes data from various sources such as logs, alerts, events etc. to detect and respond to any anomalies or incidents.

By adopting a zero trust architecture approach for cloud computing, Defence Departments and Armed Forces can improve their cyber security posture and resilience by reducing their attack surface, enhancing their visibility, strengthening their protection, increasing their detection capability, and improving their response efficiency.

Cloud computing is not a matter of choice but a matter of necessity for Defence Departments and Armed Forces who want to stay ahead of their adversaries in cyberspace.?