A cloud infrastructure, no matter how expansive, needs to be planned in such a way that means customers can’t cause issues for other customers. In shared infrastructures, just one breach within the environment could open the door for hackers to wreak havoc on every entity inside.

Senior managers can be seduced by tales of ROI. Or they can be drawn to focusing on core competencies, getting off the IT OPEX express, or always funding a technology refresh. These are all good reasons to move to a cloud, but the cloud is a mysterious place.

For Cloud services, top concerns continue to be security, performance, and availability. The key security issues from customers’ point of view seem to be around security defects in the technology itself, unauthorized access to customer information, encryption, application security, identity management, virtualization security etc.

Chances are that if you are using cloud computing, you are buying a service from someone else. Yes, sometimes organizations build their own private cloud, but let’s view the fundamental purpose of cloud computing as for an organization to outsource some function offered in the cloud.