Page 91 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

JUST O V ER THE HORIZON, PRIV ATE CL OUDS

one customer’s data into another’s in the multitenant public
cloud. If there were, the virtual machines running those oper-
ations would experience corrupted instructions and screech
to a halt. Still, what if an intruder gains access to the physical
server on which your virtual machine is running? Who is re-
sponsible if damage is done to the privacy of your customers’

identity information through no fault of your company’s?
There are no clear answers to these questions yet, although
no one assumes that the company that owns the data is some-
how absolved of responsibility just because it’s moved it into
the cloud. What security specialists refer to as the trust bound-
ary, the layer of protections around data that only trusted
parties may cross, has moved outside the perimeter of the cor-

poration along with the data, but no one is sure where it has
moved to. The question is, what share of responsibility for a
lapse in data security would a well-managed cloud data center
bear compared to that of the data’s owner?
There are good reasons why CEOs don’t trust the idea of
sending their company’s data into the public cloud. For one
thing, they are responsible for guaranteeing the privacy and
security of the handling of the data. Once it’s sent into the
cloud, no one inside the company can be completely sure

where it’s physically located anymore—on which server, which
disk array, or maybe even which data center. If something un-
toward happens at a loosely administered site, it probably will
not be an adequate defense to say, “We didn’t know our data
was there.” In fact, Greg Shipley, chief technology officer for
the Chicago-based information security consultancy Neohap-
sis, wrote in Navigating the Storm, a report by InformationWeek

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