Management & Security Issues for Cloud Computing
Cloud computing services are being touted as a panacea, as a way to flexibly deploy services and reduce costs. But what is the reality when it comes to security? How can enterprises properly evaluate cloud-based security offerings to ensure they truly support an appropriate security archi- tecture, as well as consistently offer acceptable protection levels and response times? What as- surances and metrics exist to protect sensitive and personal information?
The concept of Cloud Computing is still very blurry, everybody has their own perceptions. The industry has defined it in a number of steps that it could be offered as infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, application as a service. But when a service provider or a vendor enters the office of an enterprise customer they have their own concepts. And the vendors have, unfortunately or fortunately, added to that confusion and evolved it a number of solutions in the space, which are not exactly Cloud Computing but are related to Cloud Computing. So over-time it has evolved as concepts around private Clouds, virtualised private Clouds so on, and so forth.
That being said it’s a very attractive proposition, because there are apparent cost benefits. It means faster implementation. There are definite benefits in terms of infrastructure and resources, which are highly scaleable and flexible. But, as you will see in the next slide there are definite challenges for the growth of this market in the near future, simply because large enterprises are extremely risk- averse when it comes to their content protection. And security is perceived as the number one risk. tThe second point that is a little related to security is, if my data is on a shared network, is it inand linee with in line with rules of the State, of industry bodies so on and so forth.
And finally the challenging question that everybody has in their minds isas who should be responsible for what? So is the service provider taking the ownership of security? Or is the ownership of security actually in the hands of the customer? So those are some of the questions.
It has been heard that there have been some instances of breakdowns in the recent past with respect to Cloud Computing. And not all of them have been related to security, security per sayper se; , it could have been with respect to power outages, performance-based issues-. Bbut that has just compounded the perception of how risky Cloud Computing is actually for an enterprise business.
This is an illustration or representation of some of the concerns that the actual customers have. So they are saying, okay, if I am in a shared environment and if there is a security threat intended for another enterprise is it going to cause a breakdown to my data or my [concern]content. and stuff like that. So there are a number of concerns,- actual (valid) concerns that they have in their minds about Cloud Computing.
The other thing is that iIn the US what we are seeing is that the Cloud Computing business model appears to be so attractive to a lot of small and medium enterprises that they are trying to push it down and adapt to it quickly, which could be a problem for the IT Department internally or the IT security internally within that organisation.
So this is a snapshot of the actual topics related to security within the Cloud Computing space, Identify and Access Management, Data Encryption, Regulatory Compliance, Interoperability, Virtualisation, Security, Risk Management, Network breakdown, Infrastructure Reliability, Recovery and Shared Servers.
So let us throw open the floor to the panel, and find out if they have any best practices within their systems to kind of safeguard against any of these. I am just going to- , next slide please,- I am going to just pass on the baton to our esteemed guests, and allow them to take a minute to introduce themselves and what they do in the Cloud Computing space. If we could start with Eu Ween?
By Vidya S. Nath, Senior Industry Analyst - Digital Media; Team Leader, ICT, Frost & Sullivan
(Courtesy: NetEvents)