Cloud security is dependent on the law

I am a true believer in the disruptive value of cloud computing, especially the long term drive towards so-called "public cloud" services. As I've noted frequently of late, the economics are just too compelling, and the issues around security and the law will eventually be addressed.

However, lately there has been some interesting claims of the superiority of public clouds over privately managed forms of IT, including private cloud environments. The latest is a statement from Gartner analyst Andrew Walls, pointing out that enterprises simply assume self-managed computing environments are more secure than shared public services:

"When you go to the private cloud they start thinking, 'this is just my standard old data centre, I just have the standard operational issues, there's been no real change in what we do', and this is a big problem because what this tells us is the data centre managers are not looking at the actual impact on the security program that the virtualisation induces."

"They see public cloud as being a little bit more risky therefore they won't go with it. Now the reality is, from my own experience in talking to security organisations and data centre managers around the world is that in many of these cases, you're far safer in the public cloud than you are on your own equipment."

So, Walls seems to be saying that many (most?) IT organizations don't understand how virtualization changes "security," much less cloud, and therefore those organizations would be better off putting their infrastructure in the hands of a public cloud provider. That, to me, is a generalization so broad it's likely useless. There are way too many variables in the equation to make a blanket statement for the applications at any one company, much less for an entire industry.

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Source: C-Net
By: James Urquhart