Can cloud computing be entirely trusted?
Tim Finin, 9:54am 10 November 2009The Economist has been running a series of online Oxford Union style debates on topical issues — CEO pay, healthcare, climate change, etc. The latest one is on the cloud computing: This house believes that the cloud can’t be entirely trusted.
In his opening remarks, moderator Ludwig Siegele says
“The participants in this debate, including the three guest speakers, all agree that computing is moving into the cloud. “We are experiencing a disruptive moment in the history of technology, with the expansion of the role of the internet and the advent of cloud-based computing”, says Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, which generates about a third of the firm’s revenues ($13 billion) and more than half of its profits ($4.5 billion) in the most recent quarter. Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com, the world’s largest SaaS provider with over $1.2 billion in sales in the past 12 months, is no less bullish: ‘Like the shift [from the mainframe to the client/server architecture] that roiled our industry in decades past, the transition to cloud computing is happening now because of major discontinuities in cost, value and function.’”
While the debate’s proposition suggests that security or privacy is its focus, it’s really a broader argument about how software services will be delivered in the future in which security is just one aspect.
“Whether and to what extent companies and consumers elect to hand their computing over to others, of course, depends on how much they trust the cloud. And customers still have many questions. How reliable are such services? What about privacy? Don’t I lose too much control? What if Salesforce.com, for instance, changes its service in a way I do not like? Are such web-based services really cheaper than traditional software? And how easy is it to get my data if I want to change providers? Are there open technical standards that would make this easier?”
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December 1st, 2009 at 5:38 am
Sooner or later, people will accept that, to gain access to unlimited stroage and computing, compromise on security is required. Or rather push only that data to cloud in which they are okay, even if security is compromized a bit.
May be due to legal complications involved, cloud vendors may not really be able to commit themselves to security of user’s data. But competition will definately force them to deal with end-users data with utmost care.