Can We Trust Clouds?

>> Saturday, December 13, 2008

I attended Microsoft unconference during eScience 2008 and we had a discussion on Cloud vs Grids. After all the funny arguments like cloud == grid?, people talked about the trust in the cloud, which I think is an interesting issue.
Can a company put their valuable data on the cloud? I think it is not a direct Yes or No. If you already have applications hosted within your environment, your data is already vulnerable to attacks. Hackers can still come and get in to your data or database. So putting your data in to cloud will transfer the responsibility to the cloud provider.
I agree that big companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are hot targets than your domain, but don't you think that they have better security solutions than individual domains? One of the advantages of clouds is economies of scale and may be cloud providers can leverage on the economies of scale to provide better security. At the same time they might not like to see some one suing them, hurting their image. All these companies must have thought well before becoming a provider and I assume they have better methods for protection.
Another dimension to this problem is whether a different user, using the same provider, can access someone else's data. I think this is a simple authorization problem which the providers must have already thought of. Especially with Amazon, with VMs, I think its kinda hard to do that. I guess most of the time, we will get a sand box with any provideer, with tons of restrictions to access outside of it.
Next problem is can you trust the cloud provider itself? Well, I think that is something a company should consider before selecting a provider. Of course with top providers there won't be a problem like this. I don't think Amazon won't do that. Oh wait ... where is your mail account? Gmail, hotmail or Yahoo isn't it? Seems you believe in those providers for a long time. But if you are using a fairly new or unknown provider, then definitely this is an issue.

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