3 Cloud Computing Concerns that refuse to fade away

 Cloud Concerns abound, however we are seeing quite a few of them getting addressed over the last 2-3 years. Here lets explore 3 such concerns that refuse to go away

Security over the Public Cloud: Security has been a constant concern over the public cloud from several angles

• Data on shared storage infrastructure: How secure is my data on such a shared resource? How segregated is my data from my competition? Will plain encryption mechanisms be sufficient?
• Authentication and Authorization: How will authentication mechanism over the cloud work? Will the corporate authentication controls extend to cover public cloud? Or would public clouds maintain their own authentication directories that override the enterprise laid out identities?
• Data longevity and recovery: What if my cloud provider gets acquired? How would recovery of data work across geographies. Will recovering my data be governed by the rules laid out in the country where my data resides?

Seamlessly moving applications across hybrid clouds: Application movement across private and public clouds to take advantage of the infinite elasticity of public clouds is a problem not fully resolved yet. How would data access happen across the enterprise firewall? Will it throw open security loopholes for hackers to exploit? Companies like Rightscale have been tinkering on solutions that address this problem.

Risk & Compliance: Enterprises are accountable to their customers for the integrity of data. However when this data is pushed over public cloud - who assumes responsibility for data integrity? Would it be the onus of the cloud provider or joint ownership between the cloud provider and the enterprise? Definitive answers and workable models are being explored still.

Cloud Computing - Going by the predictions

Cloud computing has been the proverbial gold pot at the end of the rainbow all these years. Coming at us in several avatars over the last decade as grid computing, high performance computing, network computing, cloud computing looks to be finally coming of age based on the hype levels, the activity levels both among start-ups and mature industry players and the maturity of services that are needed for a cloud story to really take shape.

Gartner list cloud computing as one of the key 2011 strategic technologies to keep tabs on. While there are a lot of wrinkles that need to be ironed out, it also has provided an opportunity niche startups to take roots and attempt solving these open issues to ensure widespread and smoother adoption and consequent realization of the true potential of cloud computing.

 Over the next series of posts, I aim to discover the cloud computing arena along with my readers and "uncloud the cloud"