Software as a service models, currently in their infancy, were now essential for businesses, said Wael Mohamed, vice president of server security at Trend Micro.
"There's no way for you to survive without one app or multiple apps in the cloud," said Mohamed, speaking at a breakfast seminar on security in the cloud, which was held in Sydney by distributor iTX.
Mohamed, former CEO of Third Brigade, has stayed on with the security vendor to head up its data centre security portfolio.
Although bullish on the future of the cloud, Mohamed cited an IDC report that claimed the primary concern among CEOs interested in cloud applications was security. Many problems surrounding practice and policy were yet to be resolved.
Potential security issues in the public cloud included: vulnerability exploits and patch management, web application threats, system and data integrity compromised via co-location, policy and compliance, and rogue corporate resources.
Overcoming these problems was vital to boosting confidence in the cloud as a delivery platform. CIOs "need assurances that things won't break," said Mohamed.
PCI compliance was also a concern. Amazon.com would never allow compliance assessors to enter its data centres and validate hosted data, said Mohamed.
Another difficulty was knowing whether virtual platforms software was behaving appropriately, he said. When virtual machines moved back and forth between hardware, network administrators often didn't know whether it was authorised, malicious or intentional, he added.
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