Interesting LinkedIn discussion on cloud security

I’ve always found a ton of value in the security groups on LinkedIn. I’ve joined more than 40 of them at this point because each group drills down into very specific topics.

There’s a group that deals exclusively with the aftermath of the Aurora attacks and another that focuses on identity and access management challenges. There’s a loss prevention group for those who deal with the physical side of security. CSOonline.com has a forum that’s growing like wildfire, and then there’s the forum set up by the Cloud Security Alliance.

I’m particularly drawn to the latter forum of late because cloud security is probably the biggest concern among our readers these days. At the recent RSA security conference, people couldn’t stop talking about it, though some argue that the cloud talk at that con was all hype and no substance.

There is a lot of substance in a discussion thread Cloud Security Alliance group member Karl-Marten Karlsson started recently. His simple question, “What is the biggest single security threat to Cloud Computing?” is up to 244 responses so far. If you want to see all of them, go here.

To stimulate the mental gears, here’s a boiled down list of concerns Karlsson drew up after reading the first group of responses:

Threats:

* Human factor

* Patent litigation and Intellectual Property (who owns your data in the cloud?, different jurisdictions etc.)

* Data location and segmentation

* Disaster recovery

* Long term viability for Cloud Service Provider

Data protection:

Triple A

* Authentication

* Authorization

* Auditing (Accounting)

* Encryption

* Privilege use

Good stuff, people. Keep it coming.

–Bill Brenner