A Cloud You Can Trust

And but such episodes occur with astonishing regularity, as more and more people entrust to an online provider's machines information that used to exist only on their own computers. Whenever you update your status on Facebook, check your e-mail via Gmail, or post your vacation photo on Flickr, you are relying on somebody else's computers to safeguard your stuff. Many businesses, too, are buying into the promise of "the cloud," which gives them affordable and convenient access to computing resources, storage, and networking. Even the smallest business can operate as if it had a world-class IT system.

But, as computer scientists Christian Cachin and Matthias Schumer write in the December 2011 issue of IEEE Spectrum, this transformation of the IT landscape brings with it some big new problems. By moving its data and computation to the cloud, a company runs the risk that the cloud-service provider, one of the provider's other clients, or a hacker might inappropriately gain access to sensitive or proprietary information. If businesses are going to reap the full benefits of cloud computing, the authors argue, cloud providers will need to do much more to address security concerns.