It All Depends

JULY/AUGUST 2009 ■ 1540-7993/09/$26.00 © 2009 IEEE ■ COPUbLIShEd bY ThE IEEE COmPUTEr And rELIAbILITY SOCIETIES 61 Lori M. KaufMan BAE Systems ers, partners, and vendors. By sharing resources at various levels, this platform offers various services, such as an infrastructure cloud (for example, hardware or IT infrastructure management), a software cloud (such as software, middleware, or traditional customer relationship management as a service), an application cloud (application, UML modeling tools, or social networks as a service), and a business cloud (for instance, business processes as a service) (see www.thecloud computing.org/2009/2/). Cloud computing itself is a field within service computing, a cross-discipline that bridges the gap between business and IT services. This discipline aims to enable IT services and computing technology to perform business services more efficiently and effectively (see http:// tab.computer.org/tcsc/). The UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory’s SETI@home (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project began in 1999 as an attempt to implement distributed computing through computers connected via the Internet to search for intelligent life beyond Earth. This implementation’s success demonstrated the viability of using the Internet as a host for grid computing applications. Concurrent with this project, others were also developing their own variants of cloud computing. Salesforce.com introduced one of the first practical cloud computing implementations in 1999 and established the concept of delivering enterprise services through a Web site. In 2002, Amazon Web Services launched a suite of cloudThis environment strives to be dynamic, reliable, and customizable with a guaranteed quality of service. Within this system, users have a myriad of virtual resources for their computing needs, and they don’t need a complete understanding of the infrastructure. Cloud computing’s advent has made the declaration by Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems’ founder, that “The network is the computer” a reality and given the old Sun marketing motto a new life. In this new world of computing, users are universally required to accept the underlying premise of trust. In fact, some have conjectured that trust is the biggest concern facing cloud computing. Nowhere is the element of trust more apparent than in security, and many believe trust and security 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 primary distributed computing platform.