Security has been on the forefront of discussion in the technology community as being the primary concern gating enterprise adoption of cloud computing. Although this is a valid concern, most cloud providers, owing to the security demands of maintaining a multi-tenant infrastructure, provide strong security provisions, perhaps better than an enterprise's own data center. Legal, compliance and process issues become more significant rather than technical security concerns.
Moving into 2010, reliability will be a higher concern for enterprises. Recent outages in Amazon EC2 point towards corporations developing failover strategies across clouds. For example, Amazon EC2 has had a couple of outages in 2009. The First Outage reported in June 2009, where EC2 services were disrupted for four hours, was as a result of a lightening storm. The Second Outage, reported in December 2009, was "only" for 44 minutes.
For customer concerned about business impact of cloud downtime, but sold on the financial and business advantages of using Cloud computing, redundancy and fault tolerance across cloud providers should be considered. This is where Cloud Gateways come in -- by using a cloud gateway, such as Forum Sentry, deployed on-premise, enterprises can enforce load-balancing and failover strategies across multiple cloud providers.
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