At the end
of April 2011, Amazon Web Services' cloud-computing infrastructure failure led
to operational disruption of majors web sites such as Quora and Reddit[1].
This was an opportunity for "anti-cloud-computing" opponents to raised concerns
on the reliability of what is believe to be a paradigm shift in the software
and computing service. The usual concerns about moving computing software of
any given company to a "cloud" are privacy and security [2].
Company executives have great responsibilities in making the right decisions
for their companies.
Having
corporate data and/or consumers information stored in a cloud raised the usual
question: is the data kept confidential and/or not shared with another company?
Through control measures such as encryption, sign-in credentials, access keys,
key pairs, and certificates, the provider ensured to their customer that the
maximum measures are taken to protect their information against unauthorized
access. Not only that, those measures need to be paired with security measures:
physical security, data storage security controlled access, etc. One can argue
that companies providing cloud services bet their reputation in that business
every day. Therefore, multiple measures are taken to ensure that the data is
safe, and to avoid loosing their reputation: back-ups, redundancy, multiple
power generation, etc[3]. But,
failures do occur: the recent Amazon Web Services' failure is perfect proof.
Although
service providers put in place procedures to ensure the customer data is safe,
company executives have always the responsibility to carefully weight the
benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing their computing services before subscribing
to a cloud computing service. How sensitive is the data stored (security or
federal agency data)? What is the reputation of the company offering the
service? Does the economy of scale worth moving from traditional model to the
cloud computing? What is the past history of the service provider in cloud
computing (existence of any failures)? Which model of service delivery the
client is providing: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service
(PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)[4]?
Those questions are essentials and each executive should get detailed and
answers to help them make the right decisions.
Although
cost savings and unlimited scalability are the main benefits of moving to a
cloud computing model, companies can still choose a middle way approach such as
private could model where the company own its cloud system in order to reduce
the concern of information privacy and security.

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