Is Secure Clouds An Oxymoron ?

Of late, I am working on the cloud security mechanisms from multiple vantage points:

1. Cloud Security mechanics for the provider interface between a Cloud Service Provider and a Cloud Service Consumer (including various brokers)
   • Protocols, elements et al as part of the DMTF Cloud Incubator wg. Our white paper will explain a little further on the architectures
2. Embedding Cloud Security in the network, leveraging various network capabilities – available now and in the future
3. Cloud Analytics for compliance reporting and forensics
4. And finally, a comprehensive view of Cloud Security
   • On this front, I did a guest lecture [Is Secure Clouds An oxymoron?] at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey
   • My aim was to facilitate and provoke discussions than suggest any solutions – the deep discussions will come later …
   • The room was full, excellent audience, lots of participation and some very good questions …

I will write more on this topic, especially #1. There is good amount of work happening in the Cloud Service Provider <-> Cloud Service Consumer front …

And we are starting to prototype the Cloud OS/APIs with extended semantics (including interface into our own UCS compute and policy plane) in our Cloud Concept lab (in Ruby!).

I believe that Cloud Security would be more robust if we can interface *natively* from the Cloud OS layer, with the network, compute and  storage control/management/policy planes …

Cheers

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