Availability

These concerns center on critical applications and data being available. Well-publicized incidents of cloud outages include Gmail (one-day outage in mid-October 2008), Amazon S3 (over seven-hour downtime on July 20, 2008), and FlexiScale (18-hour outage on October 31, 2008).

Availability Threat #1. Uptime

  As with the Traditional Security concerns, cloud providers argue that their server uptime compares well with the availability of the cloud user’s own data centers.

Uptime

Besides just services and applications being down, this includes the concern that a third-party cloud would not scale well enough to handle certain applications. SAP’s CEO, Leo Apotheker said: “There are certain things that you cannot run in the cloud because the cloud would collapse…Don't believe that any utility company is going to run its billing for 50 million consumers in the cloud.”

Fear of Security in Clouds

Organizations are rapidly turning to the Cloud to reduce costs, provide greater flexibility and quickly ramp up support of business needs. But as more data, applications and infrastructure move to the Cloud, security remains a top concern. In fact, according to the Cloud Security Alliance, security is cited as the number one barrier to adoption of Cloud services among organizations.

Organizations use the Cloud in a variety of different service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and deployment models (Private, Public, Hybrid). Regardless of how your organization leverages the Cloud, Cloud Security Threats can help your organization manage the security, risk and compliance concerns.