Cloud computing has become a frequent topic of discussion in the industry as individuals and organizations alike wish to eliminate the uncertainty surrounding the concept. Many of the concerns associated with the cloud infrastructure centers around unease with how to effectively handle security management.

Tim Greene reported in an article for Network World on Thursday that former National Security Agency technical director, Brian Snow, stated at the RSA Conference that he does not have any trust invested in cloud services.

The article states that though Snow recognizes that the cloud infrastructure can deliver services that can be securely accessible by customers. However, vulnerabilities still arise in the shared nature of the environment.

The article highlights that users commonly accept known flaws of commercial applications and security products. Greene compares that instilled trust to the trust that Wall Street investors had before the downturn of the market in the last year. Vulnerabilities should be corrected before the first sign of attack.

Related IMF Report: Dale Seavey, “Cloud Computing”

At an IMF web forum, Dale Seavey, Director of Architecture Design and Engineering at Cisco IT offered insight into cloud computing. “It is part of the responsibility of IT professional’s to take away the veil of uncertainty around the cloud concept,” Seavey said.

At Cisco, Seavey and his team are responsible for setting the computing direction for the IT organization for the next three years and putting actions in place that will help them accomplish the initiatives they have established. The three fundamental design pillars determined by the group include:

1)      Immediacy

2)      Smaller computing platforms

3)      User experience being key while computing environment and platform are irrelevant.

In his presentation, Seavey discussed the history behind Cisco’s email architecture, defined the cloud concept, and offered his predictions on the future of cloud. Seavey defines cloud as an evolution of technologies, or an updated computing paradigm that is a massively scalable and elastic environment. In reference to security for cloud, Seavey states that we are still in the infancy stages of this technology, but maturity and eventual reduction of threat will come.

Seavey and his team’s predictions include the idea that the desktop will become irrelevant, the user experience will come through a browser with shared services, software needs to work in a distributed environment. What this means for Cisco and other companies is that organizations will be less likely to implement software without a consistent look and feel, more inclined to look at other desktop operating systems, applications will become more cloud compliant, and the idea that systems who utilize shared elastic services will be implemented.

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