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Trust in the Cloud

Trust has been central to IT since the mainframe and has evolved and adapted as technology extended into the cloud.

WHY TRUST YOUR BUSINESS TO THE CLOUDS?

Trust in the CloudCloud computing has emerged as the next wave of IT innovation for the enterprise. It is driven by utility-scale economics and global reach, while being enabled by breakthroughs in bandwidth, virtualization and service oriented architectures. Cloud computing is compelling for enterprises seeking to cut costs, enhance integration across their business, and enable collaboration both internally and externally.

Trust has been central to IT since the days of the mainframe and has evolved and adapted as technology extended from the LAN to the WAN to the Web and now to the cloud.

For cloud computing to truly establish itself as a viable extension of the enterprise computing ecosystem, it must first provide TRUSTED Services on par, or not better,  than what exists inside the firewall. Without this foundation, enterprises will not trust the cloud for business-class computing. Finally, compliance is impossible without controls.

At Calm Response, we believe that any Cloud based solution must meet and exceed current levels seen in existing in-house systems and take on the following:

In a interview for the Capgemini Annual Report 2010, Ken Birman the Rao Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University stated:

…we do view security and privacy as central needs, but we also think about properties like high availability, data consistency, fault-tolerance, robustness against attack and rapid response.

Sometimes these are in tension: today’s cloud systems often relax consistency to guarantee quick response. To this we must add a further element: if data or applications run on third-party platforms, what happens if the cloud hosting company goes out of business, or changes pricing in an abrupt way, or suffers from reliability issues?

For cloud computing to really succeed, we need to learn to create trusted applications that run on untrusted platforms… The full article with Prof. Birman regarding Cloud Computing can be viewed here

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Gartners have produced a Charter that should defined key rights and responsibilities of service consumers that will help both providers and consumers establish and maintain successful business relationships which we believe should be adopted by all.

  • The right to retain ownership, use and control one’s own data
  • The right to service-level agreements that address liabilities, remediation and business outcomes
  • The right to notification and choice about changes that affect the service consumers’ business processes
  • The right to understand the technical limitations or requirements of the service up front
  • The right to understand the legal requirements of jurisdictions in which the provider operates
  • The right to know what security processes the provider follows
  • The responsibility to understand and adhere to software license requirements