In our 1st episode of ‘21, we cap off our cloud security series with a recap of the major milestones, key trends and surprises across 2020 through the eyes of cloud expert and podcaster, Justin Brodley.  If you think you might have missed a few things that happened in the public cloud last year while waiting for news on COVID-19 vaccines, hitting refresh on election results or wondering when the four horsemen were finally going to show up, this episode is your chance to catch up and look ahead through the lens of both a practitioner and a pundit.

Recorded during AWS Re:invent, we examine the cloud service provider conferences across the year to find a clear absence of security topics making their way to center stage.  While there were some notable developments, such as services providing easier cloud traffic analysis, much of the attention was elsewhere. Multi-cloud, in particular, leapt to the forefront for even Amazon who had been reluctantly dragging their feet.

Our comparison of the different cloud service providers (CSP) conferences gives way to Justin’s take on key differences in their security strategies. From Google’s cloud native approach to Microsoft’s gambit to compete with stand-alone security offerings seemingly inspired by their experience on-premises, we breakdown the CSP’s strengths and weaknesses in cybersecurity.

We chart the big moments of 2020 in the cloud, starting with outages that began with pandemic-strained capacity at Azure to the longest AWS outage witnessed in years around Thanksgiving.  While security news didn’t penetrate the headlines in many instances, Justin mentions some noticeable developments and what we hoped to see, but didn’t.

Justin shares his top advice for anyone moving to the cloud to shore up their defenses. Given the vast amount of phishing, social engineering and misconfiguration issues in the cloud, it turns out that this has a lot more to do with improving our humans than it does our technology.  Nonetheless, the threat landscape meaningfully advanced with more complex, serious attacks in 2020 which moved well beyond “S3 bucket negligence”  that's perhaps best exemplified by the sophisticated Capital One breach.

In the waning moments of our 6 episode cloud series, we look to the trends that will define 2021 and end with a hopeful signal that us security types just might be starting to get the hang of this cloud thing.