Cloud solutions providers and enterprises are not yet working in harmony

Sep 20, 2011 09:57 GMT  ·  By

Cloud computing is not as popular as is should be due to the fact that enterprise security managers have a hard time putting their faith into a technology that is so new and opaque.

According to The Threat Post, the United Security Summit has gathered security professionals and service providers to discuss the hottest topics related to their field of activity, trying to find answers and solutions to some of the more urgent issues.

It's clear that cloud-based services represent the future for most industries mainly for the fact that they are cheap and easy to work with. The only thing that's keeping the technology from skyrocketing is the fact that these types of services providers don't allow sufficient access that would put everyone's mind at rest.

"Cloud providers are a black box. You can't get visibility. Traditional technology transfer of security into the cloud is one of the gaps we need to focus on," said Rich Tener, director of security at Zynga, during Cloud Security Panel discussions.

"The question is, which black box is more secure than the others? It's a risk-tolerance game, depending on how secure they are, it's a question of how much risk you can tolerate when you're putting your data in there with them.

“We need a way to have a standard, controlled risk view of which providers are riskier than others," he further revealed.

It's clear that a security specialist who's been working with local storage and computing resources is not going to fully trust something that is supposed to be good just because the company that provides the service will say it is.

Even Google, who has a broad experience in working with cloud solutions admits through the voice of its representative, Eran Feigenbaum, that "Continuous monitoring is something we can improve on, I'll be very honest."

"Every customer deserves the highest level of security. Whether you're a free Gmail user or a large enterprise that's paying us millions of dollars, you get the same level of security. That'show it should be."

Both experts agree that in many cases the new technology overcomes the old one, showing improved efficiency, but it depends a great deal on the providing company how well they are prepared to handle the unfortunate situations, as there are large quantities of data at stake.

"We try to have self-healing systems that don't require human intervention. It's expecting systems to fail and having systems in place to fix and heal those when it happens," Feigenbaum concluded.