Cloud Insecurity

One of the appealing draws of cloud computing is “at the flip of a dime” rent a set of servers or quickly subscribe to a practical Web service. The problem: attackers are looking for just this sort of business exception. Any temporary business need translates into an opportunity to search for holes in unprotected laptops, documents or anything.

Cyber attackers are particularly interested in assets that briefly appear such as test or staging servers or data depots where they can get a foot-hold and set up their command and control

And so the story will go that cloud computing may very well have a bull’s eye on it and the bad-guys are looking to get in, stay put and get what they want.

Certainly the appeal of lower monthly or hourly billing will get my attention. I've been trying to out-smart Vonage, T-Mobile@Home, AT&T Cable and T-Mobile Wireless but to no avail. I still feel I have waste in my spending.

And so do medium, small and large enterprises see the winds of change in how they spend thier money and are keen to understand thier own on-line/all-the-time destiny.

To me, the different flavors of clouds flushes out into something like this:

• SaaS – Power to the people: Twitter, portals, apps-on-tap
• PaaS – Power to the developer: programming in the cloud, Cloud-based systems integration
• IaaS – Power to IT: Hardware and low-level plumbing paid-by-the-clock

SaaS is already a conventional choice for small, medium and large organizations alike. Its cousin Platform-as-a-Service (Google AppEngine or Microsoft Azure) is set to usher an era of productivity where feature-rich web sitesand complex systems are modeled, built and operated semi-automatically - without complex (and costly) software programming. PaaS may very well be that a once in a generation platform birth that will bringwith it imagination-led possibilities for the enterprise. And IaaS offers fully outsourced data-center facilities where more intricate workflows and workloads can run without loss of fidelity and the organization is left to focus on the line of business.