Think
Tank: Cloud Services and Cloud Vendor Management
Introduction
For this discussion board I chose the 2021 Horizon Report, about
information security, to discuss one trend and one key technology. From the
trend section we will be discussing about the Technology Trend and Cloud Vendor
Management from the key technology.
1.
Technology Trend
The technological environment that we exploit constitute multiple
types of technologies (Kelly et al., 2021). We integrate these technologies and
the services that these techs give into our professional and personal lives.
The ever-changing features of this information technology needs strong safety
mechanisms and depend on security experts.
Let’s see the following tech trend example as stated on the article
which emerge to experience in higher education:
- Borderless Networks / Network without Boundary
Services and data usage in higher institution are increasingly
transforming to cloud-based services rather than campus-based or in person
services. Network endpoint devices such as laptops, tablets or iPads,
smartphones are easily portable tools that are not confined to the campus
anymore. That convenience cause to expanding the boundaries of the digital
world significantly which needs more monitoring system and protection. So,
there is high likelihood of institutions which are not able to separate their
own endpoint devices and their network servers to experience weakened incident
response control and higher incident recovery times. According to the 2021
Horizon Report article, the evidence for the higher education moving their
services to cloud services is that the market trend of cloud computing. Based
on that article, it is estimated that cloud computing in the education sector
will grow from a $15.3 billion market in 2019 to an $89.5 billion market by
2027.
As virtual educational institutions significantly increase, bad
actors have also advanced with more sophisticated and professionalized
attacking strategies, breaches, and ransomware in higher education. However,
institutions have been creating “incident management” departments with
dedicated incident leadership and support staff.
The driving forces here are the introduction of modern and mobile
technological devices, advancement of networking, and the convenience that
those integration offer to higher education services virtually.
2. Cloud Vendor Management
Vendor management is not a new feature for higher educational IT
operations. The incorporation of vendor products and services into the
institution’s environment, however, raises persistent challenges and questions
around the relevancy of that vendor with the educational organization’s budget,
culture, values, and requirements (Kelly et al., 2021). Such integration
invites IT leaders to need to thoughtfully and continually manage the
relationship of the vendor with the education institutions. Effective vendor–institution
relationships depend on the configuration of mutual goals, consistent
communication among major stakeholders, and cooperative approaches to assist,
solve problems, and service improvement. Institutions may need special
assistant with the cloud services as most of them are new to the virtual
technology. Because that ensures their success to convey all the skills, and
knowledge their students and campus staff need.
The main driving force why there is a need to have
the cloud vendor management is that many of the institutions do not have enough
internal tech experts, resources, and staff for to support with cloud-based
services in-house and protecting those services. They are not in place of
enough cloud tech capability as that of larger cloud service providers.
Therefore, institutions’ focus will be moving away from managing the virtual
services themselves towards managing their relationships with the vendors who
support them.
Reference
Kelly, B., et al., (2021). 2021 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report, Information Security Edition (Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE, 2021).
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