CASB — cloud access security broker — it’s the fastest growing security category ever — or so Gartner has claimed. And in the age of the cloud, in the age of data, security takes on a new level of importance but also complexity.

Take the castle

There was a time when security was about a castle. Medieval barons lived in them, and then as the computer age dawned, and computers evolved from mainframes to PCs, the castle became a metaphor: the moat, surrounding the walls to the bailey and within that, elevated on a mound: the keep. As the internet era dawned, hackers and security professionals talked about firewalls, maybe instead they should have referred to moats and keeps.

But in the data/cloud age, location is harder to define. The baron’s army rested, protected within the walls of the bailey. The PC was a specific device, something you could touch and see. These days data sits in the ether, on servers, scattered around the world. Security is no longer something that is specific to a location or an object. Maybe it is more akin to a tank or a moving fortress or a heavily armoured battleship or simply castles in the air, certainly CSOs (chief security officers) must have their heads in the cloud these days, worrying about the security of data, when that data is not at any one physical spot.