Google says centralisingbusiness-critical applications,services and processes is key to ensuring information
security in the face of increasedmobile workingand communications
convergence.
Jesper Frederiksen, head of EMEA enterprise at Google, said that
by pushing an increasing number of services "into the cloud"
businesses could tap into the high level of security that exists
around large, centralised web-driven datacentres.
"We believe centralising data and workflow processes on highly
protected systems is the long-term answer to a lot of issues
related to security of data on laptops, protecting highly mobile
workers, and keeping end-point security constantly up to date," he
said.
Frederiksen will tell attendees of next week's
Infosec 2008 exhibition in London
that the massive shift to centralised services that is being
forecast by analysts will enable all businesses to increase
security at a lower cost because of the economies of scale.
"Suppliers of services to millions of users out of shared
facilities means they are able to dedicate a lot of resources to
security to provide a level of security that is difficult for any
individual organisation to produce at a fixed and lower cost than
an in-house alternative," he said.
Another benefit of aggregating services and applications in
fewer larger datacentres, said Frederiksen, is that this makes it
easier to respond to new security threats rather than relying on a
security product that needs patches to be distributed to a large
number of gateways or end nodes.
Frederiksen denied that this consolidation would make the
world's businesses more vulnerable to attack by concentrating
critical services and data in fewer locations.
"These datacentres will still be spread geographically, and
would be protected by the most advanced and highest level of
disaster recovery available that a normal mid-sized business could
never afford to maintain on their own," he said.