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security operations center will need more network insight as the east-west traffic becomes more
material to threat analysis. These skills become especially important as virtualization expands
beyond servers and into networks and storage.

That said, most private clouds are truly hybrid clouds – and these will be the default moving
forward. Hybrid clouds demand cross-domain threat visibility, along with the skills across the
various cloud types to prioritize and respond to them. This requires both a broader level of
technical depth but also more cross-team facilitation and leadership to analyze and respond to
critical threats. Revisiting the soft skills points made earlier, this also includes leadership not just
within the organization but across the set of SaaS providers relevant to a given situation.

The Bottom Line on Cloud Skills
The takeaway for security leaders: It’s time to optimize the skills of your team to the different
types of cloud. Public cloud security – spanning SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS environments – is (a)
more about policy, audit, analysis, and teamwork skills rather than pure technical depth, and (b)
will include more cross-domain skills than are required in the more silo’d on-premise structure.
Creating the proper mix of skillsets for all of these scenarios will help build your confidence as
you build out your hybrid cloud model.

About the Author

Raj Samani is an active member of the Information Security industry, through
involvement with numerous initiatives to improve the awareness and
application of security in business and society. He is currently working as the
EMEA Chief Technical Officer for Intel Security, having previously worked as
the Chief Information Security Officer for a large public sector organisation in
the UK. He was inducted into the Infosecurity Europe Hall of Fame (2012),
won the Virus Bulletin Péter Ször Award for the paper/investigation he co-
authored on the takedown of the Beebone Botnet, and was named in the UK’s
top 50 data leaders and influencers by Information Age.

He previously worked across numerous public sector organisations, in many cyber security and
research orientated working groups across Europe. He is also the author of Syngress books
‘Applied Cyber Security and the Smart Grid’, “CSA Guide to Cloud Computing”, and technical
editor of “Industrial Network Security (vol2)” and “Cyber Security for decision makers”.

In addition, Raj is currently the Cloud Security Alliance’s Chief Innovation Officer and previously
served as Vice President for Communications in the ISSA UK Chapter where he presided over
the award of Chapter Communications Programme of the Year 2008 and 2009. He is also
Special Advisor for the European CyberCrime Centre, also on the advisory council for the
Infosecurity Europe show, Infosecurity Magazine, and expert on both searchsecurity.co.uk, and
Infosec portal, and regular columnist on Help Net Security. He has had numerous security
papers published, and regularly appears on television commenting on computer security issues.

78 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine November 2016 Edition
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