Are these concerns justified, or is it simply the fear of the unknown?

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from the white paper "Cloud Computing," which is available as a free download at the MC White Paper Center.

Security concerns abound when it comes to cloud computing. In an online poll recently conducted by Unisys Corporation, 51% of 312 attendees said that security and data privacy concerns remain the most significant impediment to the adoption of cloud computing. Another poll conducted by Unisys in a June 2009 webinar showed by 72% of the respondents cited security as their greatest concern for moving workload to the cloud. Are these concerns justified or is it simply the fear of the unknown? Let's take a look.

Considerations

Just as you do when you take advantage of any new technology, you have to decide if the new technology is just "cool" or it actually meets your business needs. When it comes to cloud computing, it has the potential to save significant money over hosting your own computing resources—both in terms of hardware and software licenses. But just because it saves money does not necessarily mean that it will meet your business requirements. Specifically, you must examine both the technology and the technology provider to ensure they can meet your organization's security policy requirements, legal requirements for issues such as discovery of information when in a lawsuit and the compliance requirements of all of the laws and regulations with which your organization must comply.

Much of whether cloud computing meets your business requirements depends on the type of data being stored, manipulated or shared in the cloud.

Read the Rest

To read the rest of the "Cloud Computing" white paper, download it for free from the MC White Paper Center.