On Tuesday June 16, WTIA member company, CenturyLink, hosted the IT Security event at their Cloud Development Center in Bellevue. Moderator and Director of Cloud Strategy at StrataCore, Lee Pallat , led our panelists in discussion on the hot topic of data breaches and prevention. Panelists included Software Security Architect at Tempered Networks, Jeff Costlow, Co-Founder and Cloud Solutions Architect at Alert Logic, Johnathan Norman, and Director of Security and Compliance at CenturyLink Cloud, Steve White.

Pallat kicked off the evening by engaging the audience: “Raise your hand if you have used your credit card at Target in the last two years.” A simple enough question that drew a vast show of hands amongst attendees.

The underlying theme of the panel was to get a general understanding of the data you have and not make assumptions about its security. Speakers shared customer stories and personal experiences on both infrastructure and platform as a service.

Panelists also spoke about the importance of language in relation to contract writing. “We’ve had issues because we haven’t changed the legal language in our contracts,” said White. “Its an interesting space to see how we can change our contract language and documentation to go along with everything.”

“When you move to the cloud, you need to understand what you have and have that language built into your contracts,” said Costlow. “Understand what you’re putting out into the network and what exposure you are putting yourself into.”

On the other end of that, “we’ve gotten a lot of business from companies who realize that the developers wrote some code and then they couldn’t get the servers out quick enough,” said Norman. “Just know what you have out there and be cautious.”

Attendees inquired about the dramatization of exploits and the societal repercussions of all of these breaches. “2014 saw a lot of attacks and it’s not going to slow down,” shared Costlow.” The societal repercussions are that we are going to have a lot of lawsuits on our hands.”

“Vulnerabilities are driving the sale of security products however,” said Norman. “When there is a risk to the financial aspect of the business, companies become more concerned and proactive, but its still no where near where it should be.”

The dramatization and naming of exploits has “created a numbing sensation,” White said. “It is, however, influencing individuals and how they protect their own personal data; it’s helping people to protect themselves better.”

Big thank you to our host, CenturyLink Cloud, our sponsor, StrataCore, community partner, Technology Access Foundation, and attendees for coming out to this IT Security Event. Our next event will be the first Tech Crawl of the summer; we will be visiting member companies Base2 Solutions and Limeade in Bellevue. We hope you can join us!