Cloud Security - Bah Humbug!

I’m not sure if my colleague Jim Warner had anything to do with this but industry pundit, Phil Wainewright, wrote in his popular blog on ZDNet that if he reads one more article about “the security problem inherent in the size and structure of clouds,” then he swears he will burst a blood vessel.

He pulls no punches in shooting down the security ‘scares’ emanating from a number of sources and draws analogy to buildings and their inherent lack of security.

Wainewright states that, “It’s not widely known that, by studying architectural blueprints and familiarizing themselves with routine security processes typically followed by businesses, hackers could break into your offices and access highly sensitive data. Indeed, say researchers, it’s theoretically possible to download the entire contents of a corporate database onto a solid-state drive so small that it can be smuggled out of the building concealed in a back pocket. Yet most businesses remain blissfully unaware — some would say, willfully negligent — of the ease with which their on-premise data can be compromised.”

But we don’t read about that in the press, do we?  The fact remains that cloud computing has been around a long time in various guises, and to support Jim Warner’s argument, ‘that most major cloud providers have greater security than your average enterprise user’, we have yet to see any major failings, have we?  That doesn’t mean to say the threats are not present, it just may not be big enough for the hackers to go for, yet.  Nevertheless, our own ‘Cloud Initiative’ will be keeping a close eye all these 'cloudy issues', so you should keep an eye on it.