Microsoft tells Cloud+ attendees to find the right cloud

FOSTER CITY, Calif.—The cloud is here to stay, and physical security pros would be wise to get on it.

That's the message Monica Hopelian, cloud specialist for Microsoft's state and local government team, put forth in her keynote address at the inaugural Cloud+ conference, held here.

She related the move to cloud to the industrial revolution. It used to be that factories produced their own power. When the power grid came along, factories were concerned about whether they could trust the power grid.

Eventually, other than back up generators, factories did not think about having a proprietary power source. They could worry about business instead of power.

As businesses move to the cloud today, they can “focus on their business, not on their server,” she said.

She sells cloud products to municipalities in northern California, and, having previously worked at a state data center “security has always been near and dear to my heart.” Microsoft is the fastest growing provider of cloud services with triple-digit revenue growth over the past three years.

Finding “the right cloud” is vital, she said, and offered the following advice:

“Look at industry research to see where your cloud service stacks up.

“The right cloud is enterprise grade.

“The right cloud is also very flexible.” On-premises data centers won't be going away because entities such as police departments that use body cameras, for example, need to have recent data on site, but they can offload old data to the cloud. “Tiering off into the cloud” allows her customers to meet their different requirements and compliance issues, she said.

The cloud also improves operational efficiency, allowing employees to work from anywhere safely. And, “it allows us to take advantage of the vast amount of data we collect and make sense of it,” Hopelian said.

In addition, the cost of storage in the cloud keeps coming down. “It's pennies on the dollar,” she said.

“There's rapid development, rapid deployment, an unlimited scale and powerful data insights, that's what we see as implications for physical security,” Hopelian said.