CloudComputing: IBM cloud

A new survey shows that the growing tendency among employees to purchase and use consumer cloud apps for storing and sharing corporate data without involving IT departments has caused new risks for enterprises.

“The survey results are an eye-opener of how cloud applications have made it easy for employees to take information with them when they leave a company,” said Kevin Cunningham, founder and president of SailPoint, in a prepared statement accompanying the report.

Another recent report by the Ponemon Institute showed that a lack of control over who has access to confidential and sensitive information often exacerbates the insider threat problem. The survey of over 2,200 employees in both U.S. and European organizations found that many employees who work in areas such as sales, financing and accounting often have too much access to intellectual property, customer lists, contact information and other valuable corporate data.

More than 70 percent of those polled said they had access to corporate data to which they should not have access. About 55 percent described that access as “frequent” and “very frequent.” Unsurprisingly, respondents in the survey believed that IT security controls and data oversight at their organizations were weak, with 4 in 5 IT practitioners concurring and admitting their organizations did not enforce a strict least-privilege data security model.

What is next for Cloud Computing?

"Introduction of Cloud of Clouds or Intercloud: This represents a new model for cloud computing services, based on the idea of combining many different individual clouds into one seamless mass in terms of on-demand operations. The intercloud would simply make sure that a cloud could use resources beyond its reach by taking advantage of pre-existing contracts with other cloud providers.

More implementation of OpenStack: OpenStack software delivers a massively scalable cloud operating system. It is an open source infrastructure as a service (IaaS) initiative for creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers in a cloud computing environment. The goals of the OpenStack initiative are to support interoperability between cloud services and allow businesses to build cloud services in their own data centers. One of the greatest selling points of OpenStack is its incredible flexibility and versatility.

Big data as a service (BDaaS) is a term typically used to refer to services that offer analysis of large or complex data sets, using the cloud-hosted services. Similar types of services include software as a service (SaaS) or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), where specific BDaaS options are used to help businesses handle what the IT world calls big data, or sophisticated aggregated data sets that provide a lot of value for today’s companies. Recently, IBM announced a new business unit for launching Watson-based cloud computing service named asWatson Discovery Advisor to help researchers from different fields who want to analyze the gigantic volumes of data to find out the result pattern for developing the research ideas. This platform is based on IBM Watson, the cognitive computing system available through the cloud..."