Cleaning up dirty disks in the cloud

Many people have grappled with the challenge of assessing cloud security. This is a particularly pressing issue for businesses in sectors such as financial services, which are most likely to attract the attention of malicious attackers. Context assessed the security of a number of cloud service providers and found that some providers exposed clients' data to a risk of compromise as a result of serious flaws in the implementation of their technologies. Michael Jordon of Context details the investigations, the results found and steps taken to remediate the problems. There must be times when cloud service providers rue the day that the term ‘cloud’ was chosen to describe their technologies. ‘Cloud computing’ sounds light and fresh, a world away from clunky old mainframes, but it also conjures up negative images for corporate users, making one think of something windblown, flimsy and vague — while also somehow opaque and mysterious.