Cloud Security: Perception vs. Reality

"I believe if you set it up correctly, the cloud can be as secure as anything else," says the CTO of a financial services startup. "But we don't want to have to waste time communicating to potential customers that the public cloud is secure. It's a conversation you don't want to have." As a result, this CTO's company, which had deployed its applications on top of Amazon's Web service offering, is bugging out of the public cloud and into a private co-location facility. While he believes his team can configure the Amazon service to be just as secure as the onsite option, and the cloud's low startup costs and rapid deployment benefits are attractive, he had to ask: Could the model cost us business?