Cloud computing security awareness materials

 

Cloud computing has emerged and grown steadily over the past few years.  While at first the cynics among us treated the announcements and advertisements as blatant marketing hype, many have quietly started using cloud applications such as Google Docs, Google Earth, online storage, webmail and so on, some without even appreciating that they are using cloud computing.  Meanwhile, Google, Amazon and many other suppliers have been building up their portifolios of cloud services and signing up customers.

Cloud computing involves the provision of Internet-based information processing services.  It gives ‘access from anywhere’ and service elasticity or flexibility - worthwhile business benefits and, in part, security benefits too.  However, it’s not all roses.  The security issues associated with cloud computing and the virtualization and network technologies that underpin it are significant, and not necessarily entirely obvious due to the fact that cloud computing is still novel and still developing.