It All Depends
John Harauz, [email protected]
Lori M. Ka ufman, lo ri.kau fman@ ieee.org
Bruce Potter, [email protected]
JULY/AUGUST 20 09 ■ 1540-7993/ 09/$26. 00 © 2009 IEEE ■ COP UbLIShEd bY ThE I EEE COmPUTE r And rELIAbIL ITY SOCIE TIES 61
Lo r i M.
Ka u f M a n
BAE Systems
er s, p artn ers , an d ve ndor s. B y sh ar-
ing resources at various levels, this
platfor m offers various serv ices,
such as an infrastructure cloud (for ex-
ample, hardware or IT inf rastruc-
ture management), a software cloud
(such as software, middleware, or
traditional cu stomer relationship
management as a service), an ap-
plication cloud (application, UML
modeling tools, or socia l networks
as a service), and a business cloud
(for insta nce, business processes
as a service) (see www.thecloud
computing.org/2009/2/). Cloud
computing itself is a field within
service computing, a cross-disc ipline
that bridges the g ap between busi-
ness and IT services. This disci-
pline aim s to enable IT services
and computing technology to
perform busines s serv ices more ef-
ficiently and effect ively (see http://
tab.computer.org/tcsc/).
The UC Berkeley Space Sci-
ences Laboratory’s SETI@home
(Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intel-
ligence) project began in 1999 as
an attempt to implement distrib-
uted computing through comput-
ers connected vi a the Internet to
search for intelligent life beyond
Earth. This implementation’s suc-
cess demonstrated the viability of
using the Inter net as a host for grid
computing applications. Concu r-
rent with this project, others were
also developing their own va riants
of cloud computing.
Salesforce.com introduced one
of the first pract ical cloud comput-
ing implementations in 1999 and
established t he concept of del iver-
ing enterpri se services through a
Web site. In 20 02, Amazon Web
Services launched a suite of cloud-
This environment strives to be
dynamic, reliable, and custom iz-
able w ith a guaranteed quality of
service.1 Within this system, users
have a myriad of vir tua l resources
for t heir computing needs, a nd
they don’t need a complete un-
dersta nding of the infrastructu re.
Cloud computing’s advent has
made the declaration by Scott Mc-
Nealy, Sun Microsystems’ founder,
that “T he network is the comput-
er” a reality and given the old Sun
marketing motto a new life.
In this new world of comput-
ing, users are universa lly required
to accept the underlying premise
of trust. In fact, some have con-
jectured that trust is the biggest
concern facing cloud computing.2
Nowhere is the element of trust
more apparent than in security,
and many believe trust and secu-
rity to be synonymous. Here, I
examine some security issues and
the associated regulatory and legal
concerns that have arisen as cloud
computing emerges as a pri mar y
distr ibuted comput ing plat form.
Background
of the Cloud
The concept of cloud computi ng
has been evolvi ng for more than
40 years. In the 1960s, J.C.R.
Licklider introduced the ter m “in-
tergalactic computer network”
at the Advanced Research Proj-
ects Agency. Th is concept ser ved
to introduce the concept that the
world came to know as the Inter-
net. The underlying premise was
a global interconnection of com-
puter programs and d ata.
The term “cloud” originates
from the telecommunications
world of the 1990s, when pro-
viders beg an using vir tual pri-
vate network ( VPN) service s
for data communicat ion. VPNs
maint ained the same bandw idth
as fixed networks with consider-
ably less cost: these net works sup-
ported dyn amic routing, which
allowed for a balanced uti lization
acros s the net work a nd an i ncrea se
in bandwidth efficiency, and led
to the coining of the term “tele-
com cloud.” Cloud computing’s
premise is very similar in that it
provides a v irt ual computing en-
vironment that’s dynam ical ly al-
located to meet user needs.
From a technical perspective,
cloud computing includes service-
oriented architectu re (SOA) and
virtual applications of both hard-
ware and software. Withi n this
environment, it provides a scalable
services delivery platform. Cloud
computing sh ares its resources
among a cloud of serv ice consum-
I
n the 1990s, the world was introduced to the Internet,
and we began to see distributed computing’s power real-
i ze d o n a l ar ge sc a le . To da y, we ha ve th e a bi l it y to ut i li z e
scalable, distr ibuted computing environments within
the confines of the Internet, a practice known as cloud computing.
data Security in the World
of Cloud Computing
