Group items tagged

"Identity Management and Network Security in the Cloud"

Informational self-determination refers to the ability of individuals to exercise personal control over the collection, use and disclosure of their personal information by others. It forms the basis of modern privacy laws and practices around the world. [...] At the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario (IPC), we have long advocated a strong role for individuals in managing their personal information, not just by exercising their privacy rights under Ontario law, but also by becoming better informed and using privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). [...] This paper explores what will be possible if proper digital identity services are deployed and the full power of Cloud computing is realized.

"aaS Providers Shifting to Commercial VMs. IaaS (infrastructure as a service) providers have focused on open source and internal technologies to deliver solutions at the lowest possible cost. But that's changing. In the past year, there's been a rapidly growing trend for IaaS providers to add support for major commercial VM formats - especially VMware, but also Hyper-V and XenServer. The reason? To create an easy on-ramp for enterprises. As enterprises virtualize (and in many cases, build private clouds), the IaaS providers know that they need to make interoperability, hybrid, overdrafting, migration as easy as possible. The question is whether that will require commercial offerings (such as VMware's vCloud Datacenter Services, or Microsoft Dynamic Datacenter Alliance), or if conversion tools will be good enough. I tend to think that service providers better make the off-premises experience as identical to the on-premises experience as possible - and I'm not sure conversion will get them there."

George Reese discusses the number one challenge faced by cloud computing - security. He discusses transparency, credential management, and identity management, intrusion detection, perimeter security, compliance, and the "biggest security hole in the cloud - the custom Web application."