Cloud Computing – The Next Computing Era

Cloud Computing is Growing in Popularity as it presents the promise of cost savings associated with efficient asset utilization and the reduction in capital investments. Industry analysts predict that by 2012, 80 percent of Fortune 1000 enterprises will pay for some Cloud Computing service and 30 percent will pay for Cloud infrastructure.

However, concerns considering to the adoption of Cloud are echoed all over the industry. Security and privacy concerns are the major obstacles restricting businesses from embracing the Cloud. The success of cloud computing is dependent upon consistent, reliable, and secure services being delivered through next-generation data centers. Therefore, it is critical that organizations establish and maintain security processes and testing procedures to ensure that these services comply with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and corporate security policies. Organizations wishing to link to the ‘cloud’ need to understand the risk-control processes and the level of testing being done to verify that service and control processes are functioning as intended.