Sun Shines On Cloud Security
While it’s still early days for the billowing mists of cloud computing as they struggle to find some solid form and defined function, the vendors who strive to perform the requisite ‘cloudbusting’ techniques needed to corral this stream of computing power continue to form alliances and movements to bring order where once chaos existed.
Aiming to put forward an appropriately secure sunbeam in this space this week is Sun Microsystems. The company has announced support for the latest security guidance from the Cloud Security Alliance at the same time as laying the foundations for its ‘Sun Cloud Security’ architectural building block offering.
The intended end result of these moves, Sun hopes, will be a clearer route for the delivery of secure enterprise-grade cloud services. The challenge here will be: a) making this happen and b) making it happen across public, private or hybrid cloud environments while retaining some grasp on manageability.
The company says it will pull these moves off by leveraging the built-in security capabilities of the Solaris Operating System, which is built with security tools to help securing data in transit, at rest, in use in the cloud.
In line with this week’s news, Sun has also published a white paper entitled Building Customer Trust in Cloud Computing with Transparent Security, which the company says, “Provides an overview of transparent security and the ways in which intelligent disclosure of security design, practices and procedures can help improve customer confidence while protecting critical security features and data, improving overall governance.”
I have barely skimmed this news and there is a whole bunch of tools in Sun’s Open Cloud Platform to read up on if you want to get all the updates. The crux of the matter – and thankfully Sun does appear to see this – is that after ‘open’ the second defining term that must be used in cloud computing is ‘interoperable’. So far this message seems to be reverberating clearly enough, let’s just hope the clouds don’t turn to mist and fog and the industry’s vision as a whole remains clear.