CLOUD COMPUTING

                Cloud computing is clearly one of today’s most enticing technology areas due, at least in part, to its cost-efficiency and flexibility. However, despite the surge in activity and interest, there are significant, persistent concerns about cloud computing that are impeding momentum and will eventually compromise the vision of cloud computing as a new IT procurement model. In this paper, we characterize the problems and their impact on adoption. In addition, and equally importantly, we describe how the combination of existing research thrusts has the potential to alleviate many of the concerns impeding adoption. In particular, we argue that with continued research advances in trusted computing and computation-supporting encryption, life in the cloud can be advantageous from a business intelligence standpoint over the isolated alternative that is more common today.

                   Cloud computing is the most popular notion in IT today; even an academic report from UC Berkeley says “Cloud Computing is likely to have the same impact on software that foundries have had on the hardware industry.” They go on to recommend that “developers would be wise to design their next generation of systems to be deployed into Cloud Computing”. While many of the predictions may be cloud hype, we believe the new IT procurement model offered by cloud computing is here to stay. Whether adoption becomes as prevalent and deep as some forecast will depend largely on overcoming fears of the cloud.Cloud fears largely stem from the perceived loss of control of sensitive data. Current control measures do not adequately address cloud computing’s third-party data storage and processing needs. In our vision, we propose to extend control measures from the enterprise into the cloud through the use of Trusted Computing and applied cryptographic techniques. These measures should alleviate much of today’s fear of cloud computing, and, we believe, have the potential to provide demonstrable business intelligence advantages to cloud participation.Our vision also relates to likely problems and abuses arising from a greater reliance on cloud computing, and how to maintain security in the face of such attacks. Namely, the new threats require new constructions to maintain and improve security. Among these are tools to control and understand privacy leaks, perform authentication, and guarantee availability in the face of cloud denial-of-service attacks