Security In the Ether

theodp writes "Technology Review's David Talbot says IT's next grand challenge will be to secure the cloud — and prove we can trust it. 'The focus of IT innovation has shifted from hardware to software applications,' says Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson. 'Many of these applications are going on at a blistering pace, and cloud computing is going to be a great facilitative technology for a lot of these people.' But there's one little catch. 'None of this can happen unless cloud services are kept secure,' notes Talbot. 'And they are not.' Fully ensuring the security of cloud computing, says Talbot, will inevitably fall to emerging encryption technologies."

Comments

Never safe.

[fearlezz]

The cloud is not safe. Period. You might secure parts of your data. You can keep other internet users from illegally accessing your data. But as we just discussed, anyone with (virtual) fysical access to a server can break his way in. You may make it harder by installing full disk encryption software, but you can't even be sure that the bootloader of your virtual server isn't messed with. If you build a bookstore that costs amazon millions of turnover a year, hosting it at ec2 might not be the smartest idea...

Why Bother?

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I just bought a terabyte drive for $79. Why would I want to store data in the cloud, when I can put it on a drive and have access to it immediately, and at a vastly higher bandwidth than any "cloud"? Why would I want some company to hold my files when I can hold them locally and at incredibly cheap rates and super high bandwidth? Why would I use software in the cloud, when it is dependent on an internet connection, when my internet connection is completely dependent on whether or not my next door neighbour pays his phone bills? And when will my mom let me out of the basement?