Cloud Computing Barriers -- Is it really security?

Today during a webminar hosted by RigthScale, Zmanda and Platform D about the transition to Cloud Computing. The host ran two surveys, which answers got me by surprise.

First, discussing the barriers on moving your DATA to the cloud. Second, the barriers on moving your APPs. When I was watching the percentages of people that choose security and privacy as the number one barrier I thought about what really meant having the security as a number one excuse, or may say reason.

If we think seriously about today's web infrastructure, and how the structure of well define security is almost always standardize, then the data you are protecting from the cloud is equally prone to errors in your data centers than in a cloud provider.

For mid-size company hosting all their server at Rackspace or Serverbeach, how more secure are those servers than in a cloud provider? I will leave this as an open question, since I am seriously interested in your opinion.


For mid-size company hosting all their servers internally, then the only benefit you may see, the local access to your data, is negligible compared to the extra amount of integrity and reliability obtained on a high-end cloud provider.

In my own opinion I think that most security concerns of people/organizations that are thinking of adopting the cloud for their data or apps is based on the lack of knowledge and understanding of the cloud provider(s) itself. I guarantee that most of the time there are IT techniques to keep or even increase the current security setup.

In a different post I will include some of the questions and answers that happened during the webminar. As always your comments are welcome and ENJOY THE CLOUD!