5) Cloud Security and Privacy Concerns Grow

Photo-hacking scandal and breaches make cloud security and privacy a growing concern and governance an important priority.

The celebrity photo hacking scandal and iCloud breach in China in 2014 has brought cloud security to the forefront for 2015. According to IBM's annual CISO study, over the next year, nearly one-half of chief information security officers expect a major cloud security breach in the future that will cause a substantial number of customers to switch providers. Enterprises are moving workloads to the cloud and expecting enterprise-level security. Although cloud computing provides an effective way to address the constraints of limited energy, capabilities, and resources, security and privacy protection has become a critical concern in the development and adoption of cloud computing. With cloud computing, an outside organization controls access, security policy, and the data center. Currently, according to IBM, three-quarters of security breaches take days, weeks or even months to be discovered, significantly increasing the damage inflicted by attackers. To avoid system fragility and defend against vulnerabilities exploration from cyber attackers, various cybersecurity techniques and tools are being developed for cloud systems.

IEEE Computer Society resources:

• IEEE Cloud Computing July/August 2015 special issue on balancing privacy and legal surveillance/monitoring
• IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing 2015 issue on Cloud Security and Privacy