Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber, is credited with robbing more than 100 banks between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, when he was arrested, convicted and imprisoned. Sutton stole more than $ 2 million during his prolific crime wave. In an article published in The Saturday Evening Post in January 1951, a reporter asked Sutton why he robbed banks, to which Sutton allegedly replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” In his autobiography, Sutton denied that he actually he used those exact words, but then wrote, “That’s what almost anybody would say… it couldn’t be more obvious.”
Modern-day bank robbers aren’t using masks and guns, but rather computers and social engineering. As businesses move their intellectual property and client data into cloud technologies, it’s clear that the new bank robbers are going to be found in the cloud. Why? The worldwide public cloud services market is growing tremendously. And they’re not just targeting banks anymore, but any company where they can find data to resell, disrupt or exploit.
Gartner predicts that from 2013 to 2016, $ 677 billion will be spent by cloud customers to create cloud advertising and other business services. This estimate does not even include the billions of dollars of private cloud infrastructure investment. So when the new bank robber is asked why he is targeting cloud services, he will most likely answer, “Because now that’s where the data is” — so that’s where the money is. And now your data will be in an infrastructure under which you have less control than you’ve historically had.