Prospects raise cloud security concerns

It's difficult to keep from writing things like "cloud announcements keep rolling in," but here it goes: Israeli messaging and internet security technology provider Commtouch has expanded its cloud infrastructure with the launch of a fifth detection center, this one in Washington, D.C. The company's recurrent pattern detection and data cloud technologies currently operate within globally distributed detection centers to identify messaging and threat outbreaks, the company says in an announcement.

The detection centers serve the company's messaging and security solutions: Anti-Spam, Zero-Hour Virus Outbreak Protection, GlobalView Mail Reputation Service, GlobalView URL Filtering and GlobalView Zombie Intelligence Service. These offerings are integrated within such security-vendor products as unified threat management devices, managed security services, message transfer agents and gateway and desktop software.

The Commtouch announcement is timely because security has become a gathering concern among those who have shown interest in cloud infrastructure but have so far stayed on the sidelines. Cautious potential adopters in biotech and pharma circles are particularly concerned about protecting intellectual property; many loathe the idea of such information residing anywhere but within their own firewalls, according to an article in genomeweb.com.

And just 15 out of 300 companies surveyed have adopted or are in the process of adopting cloud technology in the coming year, says a report in sister publication FierceCIO. It's not just IP that has the corporados concerned: email, financials and other day-to-day business operations make the list, too.

But security concerns are not darkening the horizon for everyone. In a recent Forbes magazine interview, Amazon senior VP for web services Andrew R. Jassy says the Amazon cloud is "absolutely secure. Our No. 1 goal is operational performance and security. If it's not secure and it doesn't perform optimally, [our customers] don't have a business and we don't have a business."

- here's the Commtouch announcement
- read the genomeweb article
- here's the FierceCIO item
- and here's the Forbes interview

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