This article was originally written by Avanade alum Dave Seybold.

Is cloud security keeping you up at night? Clearly, it is a not for the faint of heart issue for today’s CEOs running mega companies, with mega data, controlling the ins and outs of a mega business. 

We ask today’s CEOs, in light of recent terrorist takeovers of data (taking hacking to a whole new level), and other security incidents making even previously perceived rock-solid companies vulnerable to attacks, where does your company’s cloud security stand in comparison?

Cloud computing and one of its key components – security – is on the news and in the tech journals. It’s on the minds of all of us. What do we do when systems go down? How do we recover from a data breach? What can we put in place NOW to safeguard these scenarios? 

With cybersecurity a top concern among all companies, the Pentagon recently went to Microsoft to identify and implement a ‘hybrid cloud’ security solution. Why Microsoft? Because their leadership in hybrid cloud computing and security has paved the way as a key differentiator in state-of-the-art cloud computing security solutions. Microsoft won the Pentagon bid on technical and security superiority. If a Microsoft solution is good enough for the Pentagon and the Department of Defense, is it good enough for you?

In this case, slow and steady – and being an early market innovator of hybrid cloud computing and security with its Azure product – Microsoft truly does provide the most value. As a company they spend over $1B every year on security. They have established a solid, proven hybrid cloud computing and security platform and built upon it with enhancements and features that clients can leverage to improve data performance and protect their data environments.  Plus, unlike its competitors, Microsoft has chosen to serve a market of businesses that prioritize security.

And what about the competition for cloud computing? While any number of competitors may tout they have the ‘best’ cloud security solutions, we at Avanade also hang our hat on Microsoft’s Azure ‘hybrid cloud’ capabilities and extend those capabilities to our clients to help them leverage the platform’s intrinsic security advantages. 

There’s an economical face to hybrid cloud computing as well. It’s not only about security. Your shareholders will recognize that it’s also about integrating your company’s data centers to provide analysis of and seamless access to all data sources, and to be able to leverage that data to innovate and excel in a technological world at pace to meet customer needs. It’s about being flexible and agile in response to market situations and driving top line solutions with new products and services. It’s about scalability, provisioning, standardization and billed usage. It’s about having a cost-effective solution where companies only pay for resources they use when they use them, versus making capital expenditures in programs, resources and equipment that may be viable during one season, but not the next. It’s about reducing costs to improve the bottom line.

There’s more you should know. Retail and consumer goods companies are using the data analysis tools that Microsoft for Azure offers to crunch some of its most sensitive customer and third-party vendor data. And sales for Microsoft’s Azure cloud business is growing significantly – 59% in their most recent quarter compared to the previous year. 

Maybe it’s time for you to think how your data center can be transformed to take advantage of the many benefits of hybrid cloud computing. 

Want more insight? Confer with your CIO or CTO to map this hybrid cloud perspective to your company’s current cloud computing and security scenario and contact us if you’d like to see some examples of Avanade clients who have transformed their datacenters and data security using hybrid cloud solutions.

Hybrid cloud computing and security. Is it important? Sure thing. Do you need it? Yes, if you want to sleep at night. 

What can a hybrid cloud computing and security solution do for your business? Learn more about hybrid cloud computing and security for your business, and read more about 20 security predictions for 2020, from our experts.