Cloud' seems to be the most hyped buzz word in the industry today. Its promise of bringing down the capital expenditure cost, providing an optimum TCO, and an elasticity to grow as per demand coupled with the utility computing paradigm seems to be an irresistible lure to companies.
Cloud also has multiple avatars like:
* Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), for example, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, GoGrid, Sun Grid
* Platform as a Service (PaaS), for example, Azure Services Platform, Force.com, Mosso
* Software as a Service (SaaS), for example, Salesforce.com, Google Apps, Web 2.0
So what's holding back adoption of the cloud?
As per a recent IDC survey security concerns in cloud seem to be the top reason that holds back many from adoption of the cloud. But before we dive deep into the security threats in the cloud, let’s take a quick look at the cloud computing stack (picture courtesy: http://wiki.cloudcommunity.org/wiki/Main_Page)