Help needed with Cloud Questions

[abruton]

Hi

I'm helping someone with questions about Cloud Computing, in South Africa and Internationally. If you can give some feedback before 09h00 tomorrow (24 Aug 2012) it would be appreciated. I'm good at getting the solution working but writing theoretical stuff, it takes a bit of help!


1. Do the architecture, infrastructure, and related information security controls of service providers satisfy recognized and verifiable security criteria?

2. Do service providers use appropriately robust authentication mechanisms in light of the services and level of sensitivity of the data at issue?

3. Do the applications and other components of cloud services receive strong security testing before deployment?

4. Do the service providers address the reliability and availability of its services to a level appropriate to the use of, and data stored on, the service?

5. Does Cloud Computing strategy promote collaboration by companies to promote interoperability between products from different online vendors?

6. Do government policies encourage these industry-led efforts, and does government specifically identify pragmatic cloud interoperability, and use cases that are important to government objectives for consideration as industry develops products, services, technologies and standards important for interoperability?


Any help will be appreciated.

Best regards

Andre

 

[abruton]

Summary: In the South African context, the (relatively) pathetic state of our telecoms infrastructure is a major inhibitor to the use of Cloud, both from a reliability and a performance point of view.

 

[koffiejunkie]

Andre, it really depends on who your provider is. There isn't much of the way in "industry standards" in the Cloud world. The only thing close to that, where I think your concerns will be addressed, is Rackspace with their Openstack architecture. They've opensourced it and allow competitors to use it, so there are many eyes on the code and I imagine the real problems will be avoided or fixed quickly.

 

[abruton]

Very true!