Monica Zhu Cyber Security Incident Responder & Threat Intel Manager at Qantas Always follow your heart, your passions and do not let anyone define who you are and tell you what you can or cannot achieve. Always take on challenges, overcome obstacles, intimidations, fears and hold fast. To dream and to dream big. We are all on the journey, and I found this journey to be most satisfying and it’s a life worth living.
C
loud computing today is ubiquitous.
potential. My supervisor was a visionary man and he
According to one recent report 94
supported me to complete a research paper on cloud
percent of enterprises use cloud
computing,” she recalls.
services, 67 percent of enterprise infrastructure is cloud-based and 92
“He was a great mentor and a very inspiring
percent of businesses have a multi-cloud strategy in
gentleman [but] I could only find two papers in the
place or in the works.
entire portals of reputable academic literacy on the topic at the time, so my entire thesis had to be built
And of course, security concerns are paramount:
on industrial papers.”
much of this data is business critical and highly sensitive. There is a global body, the Cloud Security
RISKY RESEARCH
Alliance “dedicated to defining and raising awareness
She was warned against embarking on a research
of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud
venture into such unexplored territory. “Before I
computing environment.”
started researching this topic, I was told about its risks and the likelihood of not being able to finish my
So rapid has been the rise of cloud it is difficult
master’s by the majority of my classmates, lecturers
to realise just how recent all these developments
and even my thesis supervisor due to the challenges
are, but it’s something Monica Zhu knows only too
and complexities it presented.
well. She was in the last year of a master’s degree in Forensics Information Technology at Auckland
However, Zhu was not to be deterred. “I like to
University of Technology (AUT) and needing to
challenge myself, so I picked a hard and exciting
complete a substantial research project.
road and chose mobile cloud computing forensics. I knew if I was able to complete this, it would be
30
“Cloud computing was a new technology back in
ground‑breaking research that would serve as a
2010 and due to privacy concerns most people held
cornerstone for anyone wanting to extend their
negative views with only a few people seeing its
research later.
W O M E N I N S E C U R I T Y M A G A Z I N E
S E P T E M B E R • O C T O B E R 2022
