Cloud computing’s security pitfalls
March 13, 2013
Grazed from BBC. Author: Mark Ward.
The word cloud evokes images of all things soft and gentle; the kiss of a kitten or the soft touch of a lambswool mitten. While that might be true of clouds in the real world, those in cyberspace are turning out to be very different entities indeed, especially when it comes to security. Some of them are downright dangerous.
The captivating idea behind using a "cloud" of computers is that it does away with having a dedicated data centre. Instead, companies get their number crunching done by a benevolent source of computational power that sits out there, somewhere, anywhere, on the net. It’s the word cloud itself that is responsible for making this sound much more ephemeral than it actually is, said Martin Borrett, IBM’s cloud security adviser…
"There’s a misconception that clouds are one thing and they are all fluffy," he said, "but clouds do not have to be nebulous."
Nasty neighbour
Researchers have shown that clouds are anything but misty and mysterious. The computer servers providing that on-tap processing power can be identified, enterprising scientists in Germany and Finland have found. Software tools written by these researchers identified individual servers making up a cloud and interrogated them to find out which chip that computer was running…
Read more from the source @ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21754034