The growing buzz around cloud computing the past few years has resurfaced what are really ever-present concerns in information technology and data management. The topics of trust, security, compliance and regulation — they’re not going to go away.

Does anyone really expect that, say, the government’s appetite for regulation and rules regarding digital records will decrease?

There was a time you could take a server, put it in a room, watch it, work on it, replace it. Now, with virtual machines, they can be created and spun up anywhere, wherever those resources are available. Many of our types of clients have certain requirements for data, however, they need to be able to answer, “Is it within the bounds of a state or country? Who is accessing that data? Do I have proof that the data hasn’t been moved or changed, and if so who did the moving and changing?”

Technology is pushing us in this direction, actually, driving us to the need for this standardization, a protocol of trust in cloud computing services. The distribution and virtualization of information technology infrastructure, by concept and definition, obliterates the safe “place” in which data used to live, and who might have manipulated it. So we’re actually in early stages of a chase, a pursuit of the means to secure digital records and information. There is tremendous work to be done. For the next 3 to 5 years, we’re actually behind but catching up at the enterprise level, compared to the cloud computing power a consumer can employ with their personal data.

There are a lot of great minds working right now on the solution that will give enterprises the necessary confidence in the right cloud, for the right application.

That’s what’s exciting about working at CSC, doing something to help build a protocol that will unlock a lot of potential, really change the way people work. Not that we fundamentally change the way any of these awesome, innovative companies are doing what they do; they are our partners in many cases. We’re not going to change the way Google stores data, or the way Amazon spins up servers, or Salesforce stores its processes. But we’re working along with them, with NIST, trying to develop the framework of Orchestration that allows an organization to determine what level of trust they need from their cloud, based on what services they need to consume, at the lowest cost to satisfy that.

If we are accelerating the concern around cloud, that’s a good thing, as all these computing functions permeate more and more aspects of our lives. We don’t want these questions to go away until we have answers, right?

Jay Noble is Director of Cloud Computing at CSC. Follow Jay on Twitter @CSCTrustedCloud