Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could simply point to cloud standards and claim that such standards could reliably lubricate government adoption of safe, dependable, accreditable cloud computing?! Sadly, we cannot. At least, not yet.
And, this fact is as true for commercial adoption of cloud computing as it is for government adoption. It is also the subject of this month’s question in the Mitre Cloud Computing Forum for Government.
Email has long been a means and target for cybercriminals — whether the goal is to steal private data contained in messages, or just to use the messages to surreptitiously obtain access credentials that would open the door to other stores of data. Today, CSC has announced an offering that can help protect organizations from such cybersecurity threats. CSC’s CloudProtection for Mail and Web provides security from web-based attacks, stopping the threat before it ever reaches the enterprise customer. CSC officials say that the cloud-based CloudProtection can improve an organization’s security at a lower cost than other on-premise solutions. The official CSC news release also notes their SLAs for the product, “the strongest sets of Service Level Agreements in the industry,” covering the service availability and performance. With CloudProtection, according to the release, every business can ensure that every desktop has the most up-to-date anti-virus software, spam filters and spyware.
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Matthew Moore can claim what few others in the still-maturing cloud computing space can claim: direct experience securing a cloud, beyond just the theoretical and postulating. His team has been securing CSC’s private cloud offerings for years.
Moore, Director of Global Security Solutions for the Americas at CSC, oversees a $4.6 billion commercial portfolio with all run-and-maintain, protection and compliance responsibilities falling to him and his team.
And yet, despite constant murmurs in press coverage about IT threats and risks associated with cloud computing, some might find Moore surprisingly upbeat and optimistic.
It’s not enough to settle for security. There is a difference between security and what the enterprise is really after when it comes to protecting their data and IT systems — trust.
What’s more, that trust, when it comes to cloud computing, is only going to be gained when cloud providers can answer a few simple questions.
That’s a matter CSC Director of Global Security Solutions Ron Knode calls transparency.
Forbes.com recently interviewed Knode in an article “Deciding Which Cloud Services To Trust.” In the article, Knode introduces six types of questions a business should ask any potential provider of cloud services, questions covering:
These are the general categories that comprise two dozen questions making up the CloudTrust Protocol, a protocol he and others working on it believe will bring greater transparency to cloud computing services, and thus create the type of trust in cloud computing that, as Knode says, “puts us in the business of liberation.”
When Forbes.com decided to run an article on the topic of cloud security recently, we weren’t surprised they turned to Ron Knode for input. Knode has been studying the issue since it, well, became an issue with the emergence of virtualization in enterprise technology.
In addition to holding the position of Director of Global Security Solutions at CSC, Knode is also a Leading Edge Forum (LEF) researcher who has penned plenty of his own articles — not to mention a series of posts here on our Enterprise Cloud Computing Guide. Knode is a regular presenter at industry events, including participation in this year’s Symantec Vision and Cloud Expo East events.
This most recent round of media interest (and it does seem to move in cycles in the cloud space) finds technology writer David F. Carr asking Ron about “Deciding Which Cloud Services To Trust” at Forbes.com.
We’re taking some initiative at the blog today and declaring it Cloud Security & Trust Week. We realize it’s not quite a revolutionary thought, nor big news, but it’s a theme that’s trending again and it’s a topic taken seriously in these parts.
And more and more, it’s not a conversation topic exclusive to corporate IT executives. Cloud computing is now a mandatory consideration for most organizations. We’ve written on the blog before about how enterprises not normally associated with computing are finding payoffs in virtualization. A recent post on how the United States Golf Association has adopted cloud computing comes to mind.
Add to these real-world examples the NBA’s Boston Celtics, who’ve stopped talking man-to-man defense to talk about cloud security.
It’s the best of both worlds when a technology solution improves results and cuts costs at the same time, and that’s the potential with CloudExchange, CSC’s email and collaboration integration that includes Microsoft Exchange 2010-as-a-service.
Enterprises with large-scale communications needs can not only reduce the cost of delivering email to each and every employee, they can foster innovation and increased productivity through instant messaging and video, document sharing and other features of this cloud-based offering.
For the software makers out there, or the business units that develop applications for the enterprise, we’re happy to introduce CloudLab.
CloudLab is software development and testing in a cloud-based environment, offered via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. CloudLab is the newest addition to the portfolio of offerings from CSC’s Trusted Cloud Services. We’re excited to tell you more about it.
In support of our effort to provide enterprise-class cloud computing services with the highest level of security and reliability that CSC customers have come to expect in the past 50 years, CSC is announcing today the opening of 7 new cloud-enabled data centers around the globe.
Customers of CSC’s Trusted Cloud Services and Hosting solutions will have access to these new data centers that feature fully virtualized cloud fabric and offer multiple grades of service level agreement. The new CSC data centers will afford customers even more infrastructure to integrate their public, private or hybrid cloud IT architecture.
From the outset, CSC’s foray into cloud computing has been focused on the needs of its customers — that’s the inspiration and meaning behind our mantra, “Right Cloud, Right Way.”
Now, CSC is excited to make some major announcements today that will further frame the “business-first” philosophy of Trusted Cloud Services. The news includes new service offerings, a new go-to-market strategy, a new e-commerce portal and new facilities.
One of the most frequently used tools to fight forest fires is … more fire! At first blush, this approach is counter-intuitive. But, the use of “back burns” to reduce the amount of flammable material and ultimately control the fire itself is a well-known and effective technique. The irony of “fighting fire with fire” lies at the heart of this month’s (May 2010) question on the Mitre cloud computing blog:
“How could a government system be more resilient to attack if hosted on a public cloud computing model versus a private one, and what are the added vulnerabilities the government would need to consider?”
