Busticate: to break into pieces

Behemoth: any creature or thing of monstrous size or power

While I was in heads-down study mode for the CISSP exam last month, on two successive days, the Dictionary.com Word of the Day service sent out the words “Busticate” and “Behemoth” to my mobile phone.

I chuckled a  bit and tried to apply that advice to the exam: Break the broad spectrum of Information Security subject matter into manageable chunks and focus on each chunk in turn.  It seemed to help.  When I receive the results from my test (yes, I am anxious), I’ll have to attribute partial credit to Dictionary.com!

When confronted by seemingly insurmountable obstacles in our lives, we can benefit from this approach: Let’s break out our figurative big hammers and Busticate the Behemoths into manageable chunks that we can successfully manage.

At least for awhile, I think I’ll let this new addage replace the advice of “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, chew well.”

Thanks to my colleague Simon Thorpe for pointing out Cloutage.org, a website which provides up to date information about outages and security incidents in public cloud computing:

”Cloutage exists to empower organizations by providing cloud security knowledge and resources so that they may properly assess information security risks. The project aims to document known and reported incidents with cloud services while also providing a one-stop shop for cloud security news and resources.”

The Cloutage home page shows this a list of “Latest Cloud Incidents”:  Here are the most recent three:

I was particularly interested in the Evernote data loss, because I am a heavy Evernote user.  I don’t think I lost anything, but it makes me rather nervous – and thankful for the local repository of everything stored in the Evernote cloud.

I suppose the message this brings most strongly home to me is this: Cloud Computing is not invulnerable.  Our trust in cloud computing must be based on solid evidences of sufficient information security.  We must demand (and, as security professionals help enable) auditable security technology and processes in cloud computing.