Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Blog: Cloud security: Google won't like the enterprise view, neither will Facebook

Cloud security: Google won't like the enterprise view, neither will Facebook

By Dennis Howlett | July 6, 2010, 6:00am PDT

Last week I was at the grandly titled Cloud Computing World Forum for pretty much the whole of the week. Apart from chairing three sessions and participating in another I wanted to get a feel for what EU people really think about this topic du jour.

The panels gave me an opportunity to explore issues around security/privacy with people who are living the issues as end user representatives. Here’s a potted round up of views from some of those sitting in the check writing seats:

  1. Generally, panelists are interested in and actively exploring opportunities presented by cloud services though they have plenty of caveats.
  2. Gordon Penfold, CTO British Airways for example explained that as representative of an industry we all love to hate, data location is a sensitive issue.
  3. Mary Hensher, CIO and IT partner, Deloitte UK and Switzerland said her company has regulatory requirements that demand data be stored up to eight years. She is under pressure to utilize cloud storage but is skeptical about whether such methods will allow her business to remain compliant. Many of the documents and emails that pass between clients and Deloitte are of a commercially sensitive nature and having them the subject of possible scrutiny by virtue of storage location was not something the firm is prepared to risk without a full understanding of what happens in a cloud environment.
  4. Robert Johnson, head of front office technology Mitsubishi UFJ Securities International was adamant that while he is prepared to consider cloud for many types of data, counterparty data is off limits.
  5. Miles Gray, hardware solutions architect, UK National Health Service argued that understanding how identity management impacts the various systems being integrated in the cloud is taking on greater importance.

Read Full Article

No comments:

Blog Archive