A couple months ago I was engaged in a podcast hosted by Dana Gardner with BriefingsDirect. Alongside Tim Van Ash and David Spinks, also from HP, we discussed cloud security challenges for successful enterprise adoption.

The podcast is up, and you can listen here, or you can view the full transcript or download the transcript if you prefer to read through.

When discussing the state of the cloud solutions today, Tim noted:

"Typically, what we see is that organizations often have concerns. They go through the fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They’ll often put data out there in the cloud in a small department or team. The comfort level grows, and they start to put more information out there."

"Obviously, the current economic environment is putting a lot of pressure on budgets, and people are looking at ways in which they can continue to move their projects forward on investments that are substantially reduced from what they were previously doing."

"But, the other reason that people are looking at cloud computing is just agility, and both these aspects – cost and agility — are being driven by the business. These two factors coming from the business are forcing IT to rethink how they look at security and how they approach security when it comes to cloud, because you’re now in a position where many of your intellectual property and your physical data and information assets are no longer within your direct control."

David noted:

"Areas such as audit compliance, security assurance, forensic investigations, the whole concept of service-level agreements (SLAs) in terms of specifying how long things take have to change. Companies have to understand that they’re buying a very standard service with standard terms and conditions."

"As you move out into an outsourcing model, where we’re managing their technology for them, there are some changes required in the policies and procedures. When you get to a cloud services model, some of those policies, procedures, and controls need to change quite radically."

"Areas such as audit compliance, security assurance, forensic investigations, the whole concept of service-level agreements (SLAs) in terms of specifying how long things take have to change. Companies have to understand that they’re buying a very standard service with standard terms and conditions."

There is so much more discussed however. Rather than repeat it myself, check out Dana's Summary here:

You can get a complimentary copy of "Cloud Computing For Dummies" courtesy of Hewlett-Packard at www.hp.com/go/cloudpodcastoffer. Its basic, but good to set the stage for management.

You can listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com.

View a full transcript or download the transcript.

Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.