The Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing 2 Papers: The Case for Cloud Computing by Robert L. Grossman (2009) – Professor of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and managing partner at Open Data Group. Published by the IEEE Computer Society / IT Professional magazine. Cloud Computing – Overview of Information Assurance Concerns and Opportunities Produced and published by the US National Security Agency's Systems and Network Analysis Center (Version December 2009)

The Case for Cloud Computing Explains the basics of Cloud Computing Direction of the paper is largely in support of what cloud computing offers us: –Computing scaled from the use of a single PC to the computing power of a data centre - having made it a lot simpler to access and utilise the entire resources of the data centre. –“Elastic, usage-based pricing models”[1] - “this is [truly] revolutionary”[1].

Cloud Computing – Overview of Information Assurance Concerns and Opportunities Detailed introduction into cloud computing, explaining the “Cloud Service Delivery Models” [2] and detailing a number of examples. The main thrust of the paper is to give an outline of information assurance issues affecting cloud computing. Principally concentrates on Security Weakness

Cloud Service Delivery Models

Conclusion of Literature Review The arguments made for cloud computing, though dealt with sparsely in part 1 of the Literature Review are nonetheless quite sturdy. Need to be aware present weaknesses or threats that cloud computing technology faces so I will detail some of the pitfalls as detailed in the 2nd research paper, but also making reference to other sources: All these issues relate to Information / Data Assurance and the present levels of trust in the cloud computing technology.

Cloud Security Issues 1 Integrity and confidentiality of data, in the case of many organisations is vital. Internal Attack from within Cloud Provider Cloud Providers may use other providers to offer certain services. This could be termed as further stretching the “Trust Boundary” [2].

Cloud Security Issues 2 There are questions that have to be taken into account as regards both data purging and data recovery. Obviously a factor that has to be taken into account is whether data / operations are retrievable from a provider and transferable to another..

Cloud Computing Cloud computing, is already in operation as Google Docs, Facebook etc and in many industrial guises. It offers simple scalability and computational solutions, which are revolutionary in their out-workings. It has weaknesses that must be addressed and attempts are being made in this direction. There are downsides – there will always be data that people prefer to keep under their control and won’t trust to a cloud. Information and understanding of these weaknesses offers people real decisions – there are always trade-offs Need to weigh the pros vs. the cons of cloud computing and make determination which suits their situation – for company / organisation etc.

Possible Security Solution

(1)References: [1] Robert L. Grossman, “The Case for Cloud Computing”, IEEE Computer Society, [2] “Cloud Computing – Overview of Information Assurance Concerns and Opportunities” (Version 1.02), US National Security Agency's Systems and Network Analysis Center, 18 December 2009 [3] “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)”, published by Amazon Web Services [4] Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, “MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters”, published by Google Inc. (Research Publications) and appeared in OSDI'04: Sixth Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, San Francisco, CA, December, [5] “Survey: Cloud Computing ‘No Hype’, But Fear of Security and Control Slowing Adoption”, 2009, curity/- Article details Survey as conducted by Kelton Research curity/

(2)References: [6] Nuno Santos, Krishna P. Gummadi & Rodrigo Rodrigues, “Towards Trusted Cloud Computing”, The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems [7] “Facebook and AWS”, partners/facebook/ partners/facebook/ [8] “Facebook Needs To Improve Privacy Practices, Investigation Finds.” A look at Facebook security as compared to Canadian privacy laws c_090716_e.cfmhttp:// c_090716_e.cfm [9] “Report of Findings into the complaint filed by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) against Facebook Inc. under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act by Elizabeth Denham, Assistant Privacy Commissioner of Canada”, July 16, 2009