Practical Approaches to Cloud Security

Cloud computing presents IT with different risks than on-premises computing. Computer World's latest report takes a look at security in the cloud and discusses several security mistakes that vendors commonly make.

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Is public cloud security more or less secure than your own infrastructure?

"In the cloud, I can set up layers upon layers of security, but the root cannot be within the cloud itself. Or by example, to trust the cloud, I have to pocket the key -- I cannot leave it under the doormat. This makes cloud security especially difficult. A simple example is SSL security. If I want to protect the data transported between the cloud and users, I could install an SSL certificate on the cloud server. But if the SSL certificate is on the server's files ystem, what would stop someone from stealing it? So now I have to encrypt the SSL certificate's private key. Where do I store the private key's passphrase? If I store it on the server I'm back at square one."

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