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FORTUNE.COM // SEPTEMBER 2019
Capital Offense
In light of the Capital One breach, should Big
Business fear the public cloud? By Robert Hackett
CYBER
YOU’D BE HARD-PRESSED to find a company
more committed to using the so-called
public cloud than Capital One. America’s seventh-
biggest bank by revenue has spent years winding
down its data centers—from eight in 2014 to zero
planned by the end of 2020—and relying on the
on-tap resources of Amazon Web Services for
computing and data storage. But now, in the wake
of a data breach affecting 106 million North
Americans, people are questioning whether Capital
One represents a cybersecurity cautionary tale.
To burrow inside Capital One’s systems, a hacker
supposedly exploited a “misconfigured firewall.”
Basically, the thief snuck in an open door. Both
Capital One and Amazon stressed that “this type of
vulnerability is not specific to the cloud.”
Yet some experts,
such as Evan John-
son, a security
manager at startup
Cloudflare, say AWS’s
technical setup made
the breach “much
worse.” AWS is par-
ticularly susceptible
to “server side request
forgery,” Johnson says,
in which a hacker
tricks a server into
connecting where it
shouldn’t, enabling
data theft. Better
mitigations ought to
be in place, he says.
Despite the criti-
cism, Capital One’s
breach “doesn’t prove
the cloud is wrong,”
says Glenn O’Donnell,
a Forrester VP. “What
it does prove is you
have to have the right
controls in place from
a security and gover-
nance perspective.”
Ed Amoroso, ex–
chief security officer
for AT&T, agrees
that for most busi-
nesses, off-loading
infrastructure to the
cloud remains safer
than managing one’s
own: “You have to
compare not against
‘perfect’ but against
‘on premises.’ ”HEALTH
LIVING LIVONGO
DIGITAL HEALTH firm
Livongo has a secret
sauce—a workforce
filled with actual
patients. The com-
pany, which made its
debut on the Nasdaq
on July 25 and had
$68.4 million in revenue
in 2018, offers apps
and monitoring devices
to help people with
chronic conditions like
diabetes and hyper-
tension. Almost 50%
of Livongo employees
live with a chronic
condition—including
its president, Jennifer
Schneider, a diabetes
patient, who says a
Livongo device helped
her survive the IPO
road show. One morn-
ing while traveling, she
registered a low blood
sugar reading on her
device and, via the
connected platform,
was immediately con-
tacted by an educator
who instructed her to
raid the hotel minibar
and snack on jelly
beans. —SY MUKHERJEEALAMO PLAYS
ON NOSTALGIA
TO WIN
MOVIEGOERS
MOVIES “ WDrafthouse CinemISH US LUCK ON OPENINGa CEO Tim League says, and he’s only half joking. a new video store in 2019,” Alamo
The upscale cinema chain opened its first L.A. location in July with
12 screens; a bar; and the “ Video Vortex,” stocked with 45,000
videocassettes that patrons can borrow at no cost. League hopes
it will get moviegoers off their sofas. “I’ve been told that on Netflix,
there are fewer than 400 movies before the year 1980, whereas we
have 42,000 titles before 1980.” —HUGH HART