What’s the best and worst thing about the cloud? Openness. Being so accessible is, on the one hand, freeing and democratizing and a potential security nightmare on the other. With the march to cloud showing no signs of slowing, providers now have to ask (and answer) hard questions about security.

A common security model used to be “security through obscurity,” according to Bill Burns, chief information security officer and interim CIO at Informatica Corp. Burns told John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Informatica World 2016, this essentially meant, “If I make it really complicated and I just don’t talk about it, hopefully the hackers won’t find out; hopefully, the bad guys won’t exploit the weaknesses of my network.”

He explained that when customers kept most of their important stuff in their own data centers behind their own firewalls, they accepted most responsibility for data themselves, but cloud has changed the game. “When the model flips and the customer says, ‘I’m going to send data over the Internet, and actually I’m really hoping that its trustworthy,” security becomes a shared responsibility. Now, Burns said, he wants customers to ask about security, about SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance, because it builds trust.

Good riddance

Burns said that security is no longer a back-office conversation — it’s a board-level conversation and a differentiator to be advertised openly in the marketplace.

He said that Informatica is telling customers that they’ve baked in security so they can focus on doing whatever it is they are in business to do — that is “part of the promise of moving to a cloud ecosystem.”

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Informatica World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE