Protecting information in the cloud

Grazed from Financial Times.  Author: James Kaplan and Chris Rezek and Kara Sprague.

The use of very large, shared, and automated IT platforms – known as cloud computing – is growing rapidly, driven by the prospects of increasing agility and gaining access to more computing resources for less money.

Large institutions are building and managing private-cloud environments internally (and, in some cases, procuring access to external public clouds) for basic infrastructure services, development platforms, and whole applications. Smaller businesses are primarily buying public-cloud offerings, as they generally lack the scale to set up their own clouds…

As attractive as cloud environments are, they also come with new types of risks. Executives are asking whether external providers can protect sensitive data and also ensure compliance with regulations about where certain data can be stored and who can access the data. Chief information officers (CIOs) and chief risk officers (CROs) are also asking whether building private clouds creates a single point of vulnerability by aggregating many different types of sensitive data onto a single platform…

Read more from the source @ http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/071d1b3c-5514-11e2-a220-00144feab49a.html#axzz2H978e3pH