Five Best Practices for Securing Private Clouds
Regardless of how relevant cloud security actually is in terms of making the move to cloud computing, the fact remains that it’s a concern for many organizations.
To help make those organizations more comfortable with cloud computing, IBM this week announced that it has partnered with AT&T to add virtual private networking capabilities to its IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+ cloud computing service.
According to Dennis Quan, vice president of IBM SmartCloud Infrastructure, IBM expects to generate over $7 billion in cloud computing revenue by 2015. But that’s not going to happen unless customers have more confidence in cloud security, especially when it comes to creating private clouds, says Quan.
The AT&T alliance, he adds, will go a long way towards providing the ability to federate instances of private clouds across secure wide area connections, but the relationship with AT&T is not necessarily exclusive.
At this juncture, the shift to cloud computing is less about the technology and more about putting the processes in place to manage workloads in the cloud. While security is definitely part of the equation when it comes to employing cloud computing across an enterprise, the real challenge remains how to structure an IT organization to most effectively manage it.
