cloud security

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a blossoming area of DR and cloud computing. But because it's in its early days, many customers may not know exactly what to look for when shopping around.

From implementing single sign-on to including social media in the lineup, shops are doing what they need to make the cloud work for them.

When it comes to security in the cloud, organizations are confident in their cloud providers, but also and reluctant to expose certain types of data and applications, according to IT industry association CompTIA. Security vendors maintain the problem is one of visibility and control, and each has a solution.

Some cloud computing vendors outsource parts of their services to subcontractors, who may in turn outsource to others. Here's how to know who has your company's data and how secure it really is.

Cloud computing poses unique security challenges. Here's how cloud-specific 'security incident-response teams' could help governments and large enterprises respond to malicious activity and make the cloud more trustworthy. Insider (registration required)

Whether you're a small business relying on Google Docs for document sharing or an enterprise moving your global ERP system to the cloud, you should demand that some common security and compliance requirements are met by vendors providing applications and services over the Web. These requirements involve who can access your applications and data, as well as the systems hosting them; where the data is stored; and whether the data is hosted on dedicated, rather than on shared, hardware. They also ensure that you get detailed logs of who has accessed your data and applications so that you meet corporate and regulatory standards, and they verify that data is properly encrypted -- a factor that's more critical outside the corporate firewall.

Symantec Monday widened its cloud-based security service to include Lync, Microsoft's latest instant-messaging client, so that enterprises using Lync can do anti-malware filtering and exert security controls for blocking inappropriate content along with basic data-loss prevention.

For Joe Emison, vice president of R&D at BuildFax, scalability was the main motivator for moving the company's infrastructure to the cloud. But once there, Emison says, it quickly became apparent that IaaS was also a boon to security.

Cloud services are not secure enough for businesses to use, or at least that was the conclusion drawn by attendees of an Interop debate, although all of the participants acknowledged the real answer was more subtle.