When it comes to the cloud, security is a widespread concern across sectors. According to a recent survey, conducted by Lockheed Martin and the Cyber Security Alliance, security was listed as the top concern by Government IT decision makers, despite overall increasing adoption of cloud technology. Security is a multifaceted issue, ranging from the above example concerning what rights are retained when information is uploaded to the cloud, to more classical issues involving data theft. The basic fact is that when organizations take their data into the cloud they are ceding day-to-day control of that data. Though they can access it and share it at will, they typically will have no idea in which physical datacenter, or even in which country, their files are currently stored. Users must rely on the provider to not just manage their data responsibly, and to prevent loss of their data through hardware failure, but to keep their data encrypted and inaccessible to unauthorized users.
