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Perspectives on Vulnerabilities, ERM, and Audit Services
In Brief
Cloud computing is in the vanguard of a global digital transformation. This article looks at how to identify cloud computing opportunities and operationalize cloud activities. It also defines the stakeholders involved in the enterprise's risk management strategy and shared responsibility model. Finally, the article provides advice on how to manage the disruption caused by the adoption of cloud computing.
A fourth Industrial Revolution is underway globally; a digital revolution driven by the rapid, wide-scale deployment of digital technologies, such as in high-speed mobile Internet capabilities, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning. Cloud computing is at the vanguard of this transformation. As a result, organizations of all sizes, sectors, and geographies have substantially and rapidly increased their use of cloud computing. According to Gartner (2019), more than one-third of organizations see cloud investments as a top-three priority. The public cloud services market is projected to reach a staggering $266 billion in 2020.
One driver in this proliferation and widespread use of cloud computing is the current digital transformation. In a 2016 address, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella advanced this enduring description of digital transformation: "becoming more engaged with their customers, empowering their employees, optimizing how they run their business operations and transforming the products and services they offer using digital content." Such benefits from a cloud computing perspective include managing and outsourcing costly and difficult-to-update and -manage in-house IT infrastructure; streamlining and scaling storage, software, and application support; increasing speed and processing; reducing costs. As a result, organizations of all sizes, geographies and sectors, including CPA firms and their clients, are developing their own private cloud or purchasing public cloud services from cloud service providers (CSP), such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS.
While such potential benefits are compelling, market intelligence reveals that cloud computing exacerbates risks and creates new and unexpected risks. For example, a cloud security breach exposed the names, addresses, and account details of as many as 14 million U.S.-based Verizon customers. In this context, one can only imagine the potential cloud-related cybersecurity breaches and service failures that may emerge from the unexpected disruption and rapid transformation to remote working caused by the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. On the one hand, workers unexpectedly transitioning...