Maintaining security of your data, particularly personal data, is an issue that has been with us for many years. The Data Protection act formalised the requirements for businesses to take care when processing personal data imposing penalties for breaches of the act.
At the core of data protection is vulnerability management. This is the process of understanding the threat landscape, applying that knowledge to your infrastructure, in-house or SaaS / IaaS, and remediating any issues that are identified.
The Spectre bug has alerted all IT professionals to the prospect of the main stream Hardware, Chip and OS providers introducing vulnerabilities that are out of the control of the IT Manager i.e. a simple patch or firewall rule will not suffice.
The Spectre bug is a real concern when looking at mainstream cloud offerings. For the next 4 to 5 years at least Data Controllers need to question the appropriateness of large public cloud providers.
