Cloud computing is an alternative model for acquiring and delivering IT-related services. The benefits of this approach are that the users of services do not need to own and manage the capital equipment involved. However does the cloud hype in fact conceal the security issues of the identity of users and the security of data. By the very nature of cloud computing, the data belonging to the organization using a cloud service will be held in a shared environment. A shared environment is implicitly less secure than a non shared one. Furthermore delegating the storage and processing of data does not relieve the organization of its legal and regulatory obligations around this data. This presentation sets out the risks and best practices to avoid the cloud smog.
Historically every new wave of IT architecture from the mainframe, to client-server, to the Web, left security and related standards as an afterthought. Had appropriate security architectures been baked in from the start, the seemingly constant need for security catch-up would have been significantly reduced. Are we going to repeat these mistakes in the movement to the Cloud? This panel will leverage the combined expertise of software and cloud vendors as well as cloud consumers to help drive necessary change.