Survey: Hackers see cloud computing's silver lining

Thursday, August 26, 2010

In a recent survey, IT professionals indicated overwhelmingly that hackers view cloud computing as an opportunity to wage attacks on underprotected companies.

The survey, which was conducted among 100 IT professionals at this year’s DEF CON 2010 Hacker conference in Las Vegas, showed that 96 percent of respondents believe the cloud leaves companies more vulnerable to hacking.

This stems from the hackers’ belief that cloud vendors are not doing enough to ensure the security issues of their services.


As more companies gravitate toward cloud computing as a convenient cost-cutting solution, cloud vendors need to redouble their governance and security assurances when developing their systems, said the chief products officer of the data security company that sponsored the survey.

According to a report by technology research company Gartner, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets by 2012, but will instead rely more heavily on cloud-enabled services and virtualization.