The Cloud Security Basics

As the hype surrounding the cloud and cloud computing moves towards real world implementations and service offerings, more and more tech heads are discussing security and data integrity related issues within the cloud model. Mary Brandel with the CIO magazine gives us the basic overview of the cloud security outlook and what vendors are doing to overcome challenges posed by the ever growing list of virtualized data centers and how organizations and IT departments can better protect their infrastructure.

Excerpt

Cloud computing is one of the most-discussed topics among IT professionals today. And not too long into any conversation about the most highly touted cloud models–software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS)–the talk often turns to cloud security.

According to Milind Govekar, an analyst at Gartner, cloud has rocketed up the list from number 16 to number two in Gartner’s annual CIO survey of key technology investments. “Like with anything new, the primary concern is security,” he says. In fact, the vast majority of clients who inquire about cloud, he says, would rather create a virtualized data center on their own premises–what some call a private cloud–because they’re uncomfortable with the security issues raised by cloud computing and the industry’s ability to address them.
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The article talks about cloud layers, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS as well as governance and operations of the cloud environments. Discuss this and other virtualization/cloud computing topics in our Virtualization Forum.