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7 Dumb Cloud Computing Myths

12Comments | Charles Babcock | November 14, 2012 09:06 AM

You've heard the arguments: The cloud is not secure, costs too much, and wrecks the environment. Let us set you straight.

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Myth #1: The Cloud Isn't Safe

Security of operations is a cloud user's number one concern -- or, at least, tied for first. It's a concern that will linger as more and more business users take their first, tentative steps with cloud services. And yet, compared to the average data center, cloud security is both more rigorous and more strenuously monitored than a heterogeneous enterprise data center's security can be. While there's a known case of a bot establishing itself in Amazon's Enterprise Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon detected its activity, determined that it violated its rules of customer use and shut it down.

Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant operations have been established in the cloud and the most skillfully secured facilities, such as Terremark's Culpepper, Va., data center or massive Network Access Point of the Americas data center in downtown Miami, pictured above. They've passed the Department of Defense's stringent DOD Information Assurance Certification and Accreditation Process.

It may be that users need to access the public cloud via VPN, as merely using the Internet exposes users to a predatory zone. But the cloud itself will eventually emerge as a more secure environment than the corporate data center.

Image Credit: Terremark website

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