Excellent and thought provoking article on Cloud Computing ROI here at cio.com. There are, inevitably, concerns about cloud computing: conformance with corporate IT security policies, the lack of SLAs, and support for commercial software applications. What about these issues?
With regard to the security policy issue, it's hard to know what to think. While this certainly needs to be examined, the experience of most IT security professionals is that they have a hard time getting their message across to IT as it is performed today. In other words, the track record of IT security isn't that great already, so is cloud computing any worse? One might argue that the commercial cloud providers are likely to be more security capable, given their competitive advantage vis a vis internal IT--in other words, they specialize in IT infrastructure and are given the resources to implement security properly, whereas internal IT organizations aren't truly experts in IT infrastructure and often are unable to obtain enough budget to implement security measures they know are necessary
I would support that assertion. In fact, the point I've been making within my own organisation (currently implementing Salesforce.com) is that the greatest threat right now to service is probably our own ability to maintain a connection rather than the service providers ability to be available and secure.
