Conclusion
You may have noted that an important and recurring ingredient for success when it comes to cloud technology is clarity. Establishing clarity regarding your goals helps you to implement the best cloud model for your organizational needs. Establishing clarity regarding the expectations of your business partners helps mitigate risk, and so on and so forth. What may instinctively seem like unnecessary or cumbersome steps are anything but; documenting "the obvious" pays off in spades when it comes to the cloud and securing your data.
It's interesting to note the rapid growth and innovation in cloud computing – oh how far we have come! It is hard to even imagine the future landscape just one year from now. We've seen tremendous innovation in e-commerce and mobile payments - transactions no longer rely on credit card number themselves, but rather a unique text string, protecting and bypassing the need to collect specific sensitive user data. As technologies like these continue to evolve, we need to ensure an even higher degree of focus on data stewardship and protection. We all share an important objective here; to make sure that we are protecting our customers, our employees, and our organizations at large. This requires that we act responsibly, identify valuable data, plan for loss events, monitor our business partners, test our network, and identify owners. Our collective efforts will pay off in terms of helping define the future of a more safe, risk-aware, and better governed cloud and digital environment.