Page 127 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

O VERCOMING RESISTANCE T O THE CL OUD

Secure ways can be established to move sensitive data be-
tween the enterprise and a public cloud and handle it safely
once it is there. But early cloud computing initiatives have not
progressed to the point where they can do so and keep the
data owner in compliance with all regulations, such as the PCI
regulations that govern retail transaction data. As we’ve dis-

cussed, Amazon has announced that it will host “private”
cloud computing within its public cloud infrastructure by im-
posing the use of a virtual private network—encrypted data
moving over the public network—and other restrictions on
how it deals with the “private” processing part of its business.
This is not enough to meet businesses’ objections to sending
customer identity, health, or financial data outside the com-

pany, but it’s a start. In the long run, if secure procedures are
established and are proved to meet or exceed enterprise reg-
ulations, then the requirements may be changed to match the
new conditions created by cloud computing. But revising reg-
ulations is a slow process. It will take established players—
bankers, insurance professionals, equity traders—several years
of illustrating the security of unregulated data exchange via
cloud computing and lobbying for a review on regulated data
to open the door to change.

After data management comes the ticklish issue of user iden-
tity as users migrate back and forth between applications in the
enterprise and in the cloud. Already, Microsoft, Salesforce.com,
and others say that they can provide a “federated identity”—
a procedure by which one identity management system han-
dles the requirements for user identity for several different

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