I spent last week at Gartner’s Data Center Conference in Las Vegas and learned some very interesting things. Between the jam-packed conference tracks, the show floor, and the vendor-sponsored after-parties, there was just no time to count cards at the blackjack tables.
That probably saved me a lot of money, since Caesar’s, which housed the conference, had $25 minimum bets. (ouch!)
One of the more interesting sessions on cloud and security polled a large room of a few hundred IT execs about their concerns with internal clouds. They answered in this order:
- Culture and Politics
- Innovative offerings
- Lack of skills
- Security
IT execs worried less about keeping virtualization-based private clouds secure than they did about their own organizations blocking private cloud efforts, or not having the right skills, or good enough products from vendors.
But when asked what their top concerns about external clouds were, the crowd of IT execs had a very clear answer. Security had 4x more responses than the #2 answer, which was compliance. The answers to the other survey options trailed off quickly.
It’s ok to call me a cynic here – I started my career in IT at 3Com and studied Computer Information Systems – but I’d bet on security vendors fixing security flaws in the public cloud (IaaS especially) long before most CIOs will be able to solve corporate cultural & political problems.
If you’re an IT guy, you don’t need to know how to count cards to make that bet! That said, private clouds aren’t going away anytime soon…
For very detailed information about Trend Micro and Security Built for Enterprise Virtualization and Cloud Environments, please go to this website: http://bit.ly/dEmlhv
