Cloud Computing's Toughest Obstacle! Date:   Tuesday , April 05, 2011 Modern life is becoming more and more inseparable from cloud computing, the most obvious example of this being the widespread acceptance of the social network. Needs have catalyzed growth, and according to research data from 2010, the Cloud market has already surpassed $37.8 billion and is continuing to grow towards $121.1 billion in Y2015. The continual growth of the Cloud market is absolute related to the explosive development of the “end products”, over one billion users have been accumulated since the beginning of the Internet’s speedy growth in 1999 through 2010. It is expected that due to universal mobile device usage, the number of total Internet users will increase to 10 billion in only another 10 years, by 2020! With industry needs and each national government’s promotion, it can be said that Cloud Computing has truly entered its stage of growth. Security is the main driver for going cloud: IDC’s recent report further reaffirms the growth in the virtualization space. As per IDC, with shipments of virtualized servers growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14 percent from 2009 to 2014, it is expected that the robust growth in server virtualization will continue through 2014 as datacenter adoption is increasingly considered mainstream in mature economies and as organizations in emerging regions look for datacenter efficiencies. As more enterprises use virtual servers, they will be searching for security solutions that will protect the server hosting the virtualized environment; the hypervisor; and shield the virtual servers from malware and hacker attacks. With data center consolidation, along with the rise of cloud computing, virtualization and VDI, more and more computing power and data itself are moving into virtual world. So, data security in this environment has become more critical. CXOs are skeptical: The prospects of the Cloud market are looking promising, attracting investment from many different sources, so at this time, everyone can acknowledge that using Cloud Computing will allow data transmission to become quicker and more easily managed; however, there is a common concern about information security, and all of a sudden a shadow has been cast on Cloud’s originally bright future. This tells us that information security is an extremely important cornerstone in the development of Cloud Computing! The prospect of data security in cloud computing has security professionals and CXO community taking a cautious approach. The main reason springs from the sense that they do not feel they have a good control of the data out in the cloud. One of the more critical issued is the relative lack of control of end user, especially when the user is outside the perimeter of the enterprise. What they need to look at? It is important for the CXO community to look at products or solutions that are designed to give a security boost in virtualized and cloud environments. Solution that is designed to give enterprises control of security for data stored in public, private or hybrid clouds is ideal. This is because, while cloud service providers have responsibility, enterprises are left holding the bag in the case of a cloud security breach, a solution as mentioned earlier is designed to stop all that by leveraging encryption key-management technology as a service. Such solution works by giving enterprises control over their own encryption key, ensuring that they are the only ones who can access sensitive data. In the eventuality of a breach, anyone without that key would not be able to access the infrastructure. It is also critical for CXOs to look at a solution that can help them to avoid vendor lock-in. If one looks at what the cloud does in terms of controlling data, it poses some new challenges. A hosted key management and data encryption service designed to give enterprises more control over data stored in public, private or hybrid clouds. So, it also addresses the challenge of control. A hosted key management and data encryption service will certainly facilitate the movement between the datacenter and the cloud and enterprises can decide when and where keys are released and secure volumes are accessed as well as establish accountability over data access and key deployment with logging and audit functionality. A hosted key management and data encryption service will help the enterprises to go out there and take advantage of the cloud economics and the flexibility that the cloud has to offer. In addition it will secure their cloud environment effectively. The Author is the Country Manager, India & SAARC, Trend Micro