University of Illinois teams up with the Air Force for research into cloud services security

Thursday, May 12, 2011

The U.S. Air Force announced recently that it had awarded a $6 million grant to the computer science department at the University of Illinois to establish an Assured Cloud Computing Center, according to the Champaign News-Gazette.

Professor Roy Campbell told the newspaper that "we already had a team in place, but we didn't have the money until now." He also explained that assured cloud computing refers to cloud services that work with both secure Air Force computer networks and less secure private ones - or even those belonging to other nations.

Campbell also said that the technology is already in use, and had been deployed to aid disaster relief in Pakistan in 2010, according to the News-Gazette.

Experts say that, with work on secure cloud services already progressing, the interplay between different systems with different security levels is the next likely target for innovators in the field. Security is still the most controversial part of cloud computing technology, given its need to transmit and receive all of its information remotely.