Security around cloud computing is likely to focus on accreditation for individual technologies rather than wide ranging guidelines, according a leading official from CESG.

Chris Ulliot, deputy technical director for CESG, the National Technical Authority for Information Assurance, told the Socitm conference in Birmingham that cloud services make the technical elements of information security easier to deal with, as services can be certified before they reach the market.

CESG is working on some of the relevant issues, including privileged user access to data in the cloud, the legal jurisdictions, the location of data and its aggregation, where the boundaries between different sets of data lie, and the recovery of lost data. Ulliot said the big challenges are around governance, who owns the risk, and who is going to sign off a service as reaching an appropriate standard. But there are no plans to provide official guidance for the public sector…

The cloud computing market is currently "super immature" and is awaiting massive innovation. As such, Hewlett-Packard (HP) wants to be the cloud specialist providing customers the whole gamut of IT services, from traditional models to private and public cloud deployments, one executive revealed.

According to Steve Dietch, vice president of marketing for cloud solutions and infrastructure at HP, pointed out that in terms of full-scale cloud penetration beyond just virtualizing one’s data center, this remains minimal among businesses currently.

"We’re in chapter zero of the cloud. [Hence,] there’s opportunity in front of us and the opportunity for innovation is gigantic," he told ZDNet Asia at a media briefing during the HP Discover conference on Thursday…

In a few short years, we all have witnessed cloud computing unleash a wave of innovation in IT. Enterprises are continuing to adopt cloud-based services and entrepreneurs are finding plentiful low cost and low friction compute resources to transform ideas into enduring new companies. With the year coming to a close, and VentureBeat’s CloudBeat 2011 conference just a day away, here’s a look at some of the more notable cloud trends of the past year:

1. Amazon web services hiccuped a few times but continued to set the pace for public clouds

We’re seeing a growing number of cloud offerings, but developers are doubling down on the ones that are innovating fastest — and AWS is leading the pack. Driven by a steady stream of feature enhancements, AWS continued its explosive growth in 2011, recently announcing that its S3 service was processing over 370K requests per second and had doubled in 9 months to store a staggering 566 billion objects! Most of the entrepreneurs we met in 2011 were using AWS somehow, and even Amazon is finding interesting ways to leverage its own infrastructure (such as the new AWS-powered Silk browser)…

Large-volume hackers have become cloud pioneers, utilising public infrastructure to threaten companies that often effect ambitious but poorly-considered cloud-computing strategies, a security industry technologist has warned.

Noting the growing reliance on virtualisation and the increasing trend towards pushing virtual machines into public cloud services to cut infrastructure costs, Raimund Genes, global chief technology officer with security firm Trend Micro, warned that too many companies are just moving their security and reliability problems from one infrastructure to another.

Redundancy, for example, must be catered for: while cloud services from Amazon, Microsoft and others allow servers to be spread across servers in multiple geographies to minimise downtime, many companies simply move their existing systems into cloud-hosted virtual machines. This leaves them vulnerable to data and systems loss in the event of even a partial cloud collapse…

When you’re in the process of establishing your cloud architecture, figuring out what can be moved to the cloud, and when it should be moved, is job one. That can seem like a daunting task, depending on the size of your organization, the number of applications in use, the complexity of your network architecture, and so on. But it’s not as hard as it first seems. You can kick start your cloud migration by looking for applications that share some or all of these five characteristics:

1. Apps that are already virtualized
2. Apps that are loosely coupled and modular in their design
3. Apps that have low requirements for privacy and security
4. Apps that can tolerate latency
5. Apps that are unencumbered by regulatory requirements

Mapping your path to the cloud will be easier once you understand how and why these characteristics matter, so let’s drill down into each…