Brief:
- Goldman Sachs veteran Phil Venables joined Google Cloud as VP and CISO this month, according to his LinkedIn profile.
- In his role, Venables will oversee risk within the Google Cloud business and secure customer migrations, according to The Wall Street Journal.
- Venables served as CISO at Goldman Sachs between 2000 and 2017 before shifting to serve as an operating partner in private equity. He was CISO of Deutsche Bank between 1997 and 2000.
Insight:
Google Cloud is under renovation. In February, the business cut jobs while reorganizing its strategy. Venables' appointment is Google's latest step in closing the divide among the cloud's three biggest U.S. players: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
As of 2019, AWS owns 45% of the public cloud IaaS market, followed by Microsoft 's 17.9%, Alibaba's 9.1% and Google owning just over 5.3%, according to Gartner.
Venables' background in business advisory is a nod to what Google expects from him and the type of CISO he will embody. Fitting somewhere between the "transformational" and "evangelist" CISO types, Venables will serve as the face of Google Cloud's security operations while spearheading new initiatives.
Organizations seeking a transformational CISO often do so because the companies are elevating security, "and that's why they have that kind of leader," Jeff Pollard, Forrester VP and principal analyst, told Cybersecurity Dive in October.
Gartner expects spending on public cloud services will increase 18.4% in 2021, reaching about $305 billion, compared to about $258 billion in 2020. The cloud's lingering delay in adoption was in part rooted in security fears as the shared responsibility model is still muddled between customers and providers.
At least 96% of global IT managers have concerns about their current cloud security, according to a Sophos survey. Security leaders tend to hold onto on-premise solutions, especially when one wave ripples through a CSP, their entire customer base is likely to feel it too.
